


Gunpowder and Lead

by prophetic



Category: Bandom, Mindless Self Indulgence, My Chemical Romance, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge - My Chemical Romance (Album)
Genre: Addiction, Alternate Universe - Western, Character Death, Cowboys & Cowgirls, F/M, Gun Violence, Horses, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Past Domestic Violence, Religion, Revenge, Supernatural Elements, Vigilantism, gunfights
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-16 17:04:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 52,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12346911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prophetic/pseuds/prophetic
Summary: Frank and Gerard made it through their first cattle drive together, but now Frank is gone and Gerard doesn’t know what to do. His gut tells him Frank’s disappearance has something to do with the preacher man.Turns out, Lindsey is looking for the preacher man too, but she won’t say why. Gerard has reasons enough to hate the man, but Lindsey has more—reasons that stretch back into her family, her childhood, and what brought her out west in the first place. She wants what he owes her—she wants revenge.American Western, set in the 1880s.





	Gunpowder and Lead

**Author's Note:**

> [See starryfright's artwork for this piece.](https://beneaththefoam.tumblr.com/post/166427489219/art-for-proph3tic-s-bbb-fic-you-can-read-it)

_I'm gonna show him what little girls are made of: gunpowder and lead. —Miranda Lambert_

.

* * *

 

#### Gerard and the Uncomfortable Long Night

Every morning before dawn, when the blue light was in the air, Gerard watched it unfold again. He relived it morning by morning, caught as he was in the cage of his dreams.

If he could see anything—the faces of the men surrounding him and Frank, the broad-brimmed black hat of the preacher man, the blue storm clouds massed behind the preacher man’s head, hanging low in the dim morning sky—he could say afterward that it was a dream. 

Not that he could understand this in the moment, of course. Watching it unfold each time, he was helpless. The predawn light was bluish and cold, and his shoulders and arms hurt, pulled back behind him, with the hands of a large man firmly grabbed on the rope knotting his wrists together. Frank was in a similar predicament—arms bound behind his back and another man pulling the collar of his jacket so Frank was uncomfortably hoisted up, as though he was a coat hung from a peg.

Seeing it so vividly in the dream, it was hard to believe he hadn’t witnessed it with his own two eyes.

Gerard’s eye always went to Frank’s hip then, and the pearl-handled pistol still in its holster—Frank’s pride and joy, the .45 revolver he called Pansy. The preacher man stood before Frank and ran an appraising eye over him, as though Frank was a horse he wanted to buy, or a herding dog. He put his hand out and grabbed Frank’s chin, turning his head first to one side, then the other, while Frank tried to pull away. 

“Disgusting, sinful thing,” the preacher man said, and spat on the ground at Frank’s feet.

He caught the eye of the man holding Frank’s collar. The man shoved Frank, who fell to his knees in the dirt. Sometimes the gun landed on the dusty ground in the tussle. Sometimes the preacher man gave another glance to the man who had pushed Frank, and the man leaned and lifted it neatly out of the holster as Frank struggled to stop him. The man tossed it to the preacher, who caught it neatly and slipped it inside his coat.

Then the preacher man cast his eye toward Gerard, and the man holding his wrists gave him a rough kick that buckled his knees and sent him sprawling. Sometimes Gerard landed on his face in the dirt, unable to keep his balance with his arms bound. Sometimes he jerked away from the man first, and the man caught him roughly around the waist or shoulders. No matter what, his face was turned away, or his vision obscured somehow—and it was always then that Gerard heard the gunshot.

With the gunshot ringing in his ears, he would wake, breath caught, sheets wet through with cold sweat. Soon enough after that, he would try to reason with himself. That wasn’t real, he told himself. You never saw none of that.

 

That first morning, after the thing which had or had not happened in the predawn light, Gerard woke in a jail cell. It had one high window—high enough that Gerard could only see out it when he balanced on the bunk set against the wall several feet away. He grasped the window bars and pulled himself up briefly, before dropping, wincing at the awful pain in his shoulders. From the feel of it, someone had tried to pull his arms off the night before. But he saw the open town square momentarily out the window, crosshatched by the metal bars. His mind’s eye told him the square was where the preacher man and his goons had been the night before, but it was empty and still now.

Gerard shouted, calling first for someone to come to him, then simply a string of every profane word he could call to mind that morning. He picked up the empty bucket, the makeshift latrine standing in the corner of the cell, and hurled it against the bars. It made a satisfying racket. He did it again, harder. He shook the barred door in its hinges and then slammed his fist against the bars. A rough barb in the metal sliced the meaty side of his palm, and he yelped and pulled away, stunned briefly to silence, while he slapped a hand over the cut. His blood dripped onto the floor. 

The door at the front of the building creaked open and a man walked in from outside. Gerard squinted at the star on his vest. Deputy.

“You’re making a lot of noise, son,” the deputy said, and leaned against the desk that faced the cell.

“What—” Gerard shouted, and stopped himself, forcing his voice down to a tone that might be within a stone’s throw of respectful. After a deep breath, he asked, “What happened this morning? Sir.” He heard the quaver in his voice, but hoped the deputy didn’t.

“Morning?” the deputy said. “Nothing, so far as I know. You been right here all night, son. They brought you in at midnight, and you were drunk as a skunk.”

“At … midnight?” Gerard said and choked. His voice was rough after all the hollering. A drop of blood oozed through his sticky hands as he clasped them together. The deputy stood from the desk and opened a closet door in the wall behind it.

“But Frank. What about Frank?” Gerard called.

“Who’s this Frank,” the deputy said into the closet, as he rummaged amongst the shelves. “There weren’t no one with you, son, except the two boys from the Dusty Rose who dragged you in. Maybe your friend Frank got hisself a room and slept it off. Something you might of considered yourself before you ended up here.”

The deputy emerged from the closet with a rag that he tossed between the bars. It landed at Gerard’s feet.

“Try not to spread your blood over too much in there, if you can help it,” he said. “Ada just gave the cells a good cleaning on Saturday.”

Gerard picked up the rag and wrapped his hand. The deputy took a sheaf of papers from the desk drawer and commenced filling out numbers in some kind of intricate ledger, wholly unperturbed by Gerard’s predicament.

“Excuse me?” Gerard called to the deputy after a time. “Could you at least get me some water? Sir?”

 

And this was how Gerard found that the bluish, pre-dawn memories, the ones that would keep returning in his dreams, couldn’t be true. He had been in the jail cell, apparently, while something, or maybe nothing, had transpired outside.

After an hour or so that morning, the deputy unlocked the cell door and swung it open. Gerard handed over four precious dollars as a fine for public drunkenness and stumbled into the town square, into the splitting headache of the late morning sun. He hurried from place to place, asking after Frank, the short cowman from Bar N with black hair and tattoos on his hands. Everywhere he went, he was met with raised eyebrows and shaking heads. The saloons, every boarding house, not a few brothels, and finally, when the sun’s light had shifted and the crawling anxiety of the blue-tinged dreams was coming back over him, at the coroner’s.

The last thing Gerard did that day was walk carefully over the square, eying the length and breadth of it. He kicked through the bare dirt, eyes on the tips of his boots, looking for spent casings or spots of blood—anything that might hint at what had happened the night before. Finding what he did—dust, grit, and precious little else—gave him a sense of frustration and a powerful thirst that landed him back at the Dusty Rose with a pint of warm beer in his hand as the day chased hard toward twilight.

Most of the Bar N cowboys were still in town, newly rich and drinking off their wages. He found his way among them before the night had worn on too long. 

“You seem awful shook up, and I respect that,” Arkansas Pete, the tall one, said. “But how do you know he ain’t just took his wages and run? Jake and Old Lem already left back down to San Antone.” He shrugged. “That ain’t no cause for alarm.”

“We done every night watch together since Red River. After the drive, we were going to go to San Francisco,” Gerard said, casting his eyes over the cowboys, looking for an expression of sympathy among them. Finally he said softly, “He was my friend. You know that.”

The Bar N boys grumbled and nodded with reluctant concern. Billy in the sheepskin vest conceded, “It’s true, it don’t seem right. Frank ain’t one to run off. And we know you was his friend.” The others nodded in agreement. But they could add nothing else about Frank’s whereabouts.

 

When Gerard woke early and began his rounds of questioning the next morning, it seemed that the preacher had disappeared as completely as Frank had. No one knew where he had come from, where he was going, or even his name. For all that their drink-addled tales were worth, none of the cowmen had seen the preacher that night, not that they were the type who would seek out the company of a church man. The town folk that Gerard could cajole into talking to him acknowledged that a circuit preacher would come through every week or so. When he did, the wives and pious men would call together a praise meeting that would turn out most everyone who lived in town.  But for all that, they didn’t seem to judge much difference between one circuit rider and the next.

“But what about this week? What about the day before yesterday?” Gerard would prompt, trying to nudge them into some kind of recollection. “He was leading a meeting in the evening. He was tall and wore a string tie and big black hat. Sort of an angry look about him.”

“That’s every circuit preacher, except the freshest young ones. It’s a thankless life, doing the Lord’s work.” The clerk at the hardware store counter shook his head with respect.

“There’s a settled minister and a church up in Junction City,” a woman piped up from behind him. “If you need to get saved, son, you could go talk to him.”

Later that day, Gerard walked to the small cemetery outside of town. There were no new graves, and for this he was grateful. Even an unmarked plot, newly turned, would have unsettled him worse that he could stand, his mind racing as it was.

Nothing he had found matched what he had seen in the dream. That night, back at the Dusty Rose, Gerard sank lower into his drink.

 

After several days, as people began to recognize him more and more around town, Gerard could see the look in their faces change as he approached them, a softening mix of pity and avoidance. The time Gerard spent asking questions of the townfolk got shorter and shorter each day, and he found himself leaning up against the bar at the Dusty Rose earlier and earlier. The other Bar N boys drifted away, going back south or east, and Gerard drank and played poker with the locals in the evening. As it got dark, Gerard helped himself generously to the whiskey from the bar, counting the coins slipping between his fingers as money well spent, before stumbling up the stairs to his room above the saloon. Each night, he prayed it would be enough to keep the dreams away.

It rarely was.

When the moon’s cool blue light came in the window, Gerard heard the gunshot ring in his mind. As the nights grew to days and then to weeks, it was the memory of the sound that wouldn’t let him rest.

Every gun makes its own tune, he repeated to himself, though he couldn’t remember where he’d first heard that old saw. The more frequently the gunshot interrupted his sleep, the more he became convinced that the gun he heard was Frank’s gun, Pansy, the .45 with pearl handles. Gerard had heard Frank shoot it often enough, at snakes or coyotes on the trail to frighten them away from the herd. Gerard had held her in his hands a time or two, admiring the iridescent silver of the grips and running his fingers over the rough-carved name—P A N S Y—that marched in a curve on the right side grip so it would always sit nestled against Frank’s palm.

Perhaps Gerard didn’t see anything from the jail cell, perhaps seeing anything would have been impossible—but he still could have heard. And the sounds that kept recurring in his dreams—the shot from Frank’s gun, the sound of a body hitting the hard packed earth—chilled him to his core. And so, every time he jerked awake at the sound of gunfire, Gerard felt two truths branded in his mind, lingering with the urgency of a bad dream.

The first was: something was wrong. Frank hadn’t gone back to San Antonio or to Nevada. He hadn’t left town without telling Gerard. Something had happened, something evil. If Frank was still alive, he needed Gerard to find him. For Gerard to find him, Gerard would have to find the preacher man—the man whose haughty glare turned Gerard’s stomach, and who, outside of the dream, Gerard hardly remembered.

But the second thought, which grew with a looming desperation as his certainty in the first one shrank, was: he needed another drink. And so, rolling his shoulders that were stiffer every time he woke from sleep, Gerard would rise from the lumpy bed in his rented rooms and make his way into the hallway and downstairs again to the barroom.

 

#### Gerard Meets a Different Kind of Cowboy

Early that morning, in the deserted barroom, Gerard hollered and banged on the bar with a tin cup. No one would come out. It wasn’t until he called, “Fine, then, I’ll get it myself,” and set about hoisting himself unsteadily over the bar counter that an older woman in a housecoat and a scarf around her hair appeared from the back.

She gave him a baleful look and rummaged underneath the bar for a clean glass. “Whiskey, I take it,” she said. “From the smell of it,” she added, with a disgusted glance at Gerard.

“Yes ma’am,” Gerard said politely, and dropped himself back from the bar to the floor.

She shook her head as she poured and pocketed his coins with a huff before shuffling back to bed.

Gerard took his glass and sat down at the table by the back window, where the poker game had been the night before. He could see the yards and outbuildings that made up backside of the main street—the pump and the stables, a chicken run where the hens were starting to rouse and peck at the ground.

The wooden floor creaked and he turned to see a woman standing by the table. He narrowed his eyes, trying to take her in. She was dressed like a man—denim pants, a white shirt, and a black vest with short fringe. A red bandana was tied round her neck like a bib. She tossed her black hat on the table and sat down opposite him.

“You,” he said, squinting. “You were at the poker table last night.” He recognized the jaunty bandana.

She nodded, dipping her chin once. Her face was calm, a still pool of water, the same face she had worn last night as she tossed her cards out on the table. Her black hair was pulled back from her face. There wasn’t much about her that looked ladylike, but he was still surprised to see a woman out in the saloons, morning or night, seeming easy in such rough company.

“My money,” he said bitterly. “You have a lot of it.”

She surveyed him calmly from across the table. “I suppose I do,” she said, after a space. “A card player that’s drunk rarely comes out ahead. And you were past drunk then. I’d wager you still are.”

Gerard sniffed and turned his attention toward his glass. 

“I’m Lindsey,” she said, after a while, still leaning back in her chair like she might stay there til the sun was full up.

Lindsey. He frowned. A man’s name. He realized he had expected she would tell him her first name, instead of making him address her like a schoolmarm. “Well, Miss Lindsey,” he said after a time, “I’m touched by what I take to be your concern over my wellbeing.” He touched his forehead, but found that his hat wasn’t anywhere within reach. He would have to find it again. Hopefully it hadn’t gone far.

“Just Lindsey is fine,” she said.

“Well,” he said. “Lindsey. You can call me Gerard. And I can assure you, I’m hardly started.” He tipped his glass in her direction.

She didn’t move, but her brows quirked together and her face took on the slightest cast of concern. Gerard caught that look, the imperceptible change—caught it the same as he would catch the shift of the afternoon wind that would bring rain before nightfall.

“What now?” he said, disgusted. He’d seen that softness in too many faces lately.

“You’ve been here for three weeks,” she said. “People are starting to know you well enough, for all that you keep your face hidden behind a glass.”

Gerard turned away from her to look out the window. The color in the tufts of grass were coming back after the hot dry summer. With just a touch of rain, it was starting to green up again.

“Why are you bothering with me?” he asked.

“I hear what people say about you.”

“And what’s that,” he said, fairly certain he didn’t care to know.

“The Bar N foreman said you were good on the trail, but ever since you misplaced that little friend of yours, you’re drunk most times. Said he’d have to see you walking straight two days in a row before he ever hired you for anything again.”

Gerard sighed. It was no surprise to hear it said, but it still stung. 

“Folks around town, they say you had a lot of questions at first, but now you don’t have quite so much to say.” She leaned forward and he found himself looking into her dark eyes. “But what I hear is that you’re looking for a preacher man.”

Gerard’s chair creaked as he sat back. “Maybe I am,” he said. “What of it?”

“As it happens, I’m looking for a preacher man too,” she said.

Her words made something funny jump in his chest. He put down the glass.

She continued. “I’d like to hear the story of what happened. To you, and your friend Frank, and what you think the preacher man has to do with it.”

Gerard sat still. It was the first time anyone had said Frank’s name since the Bar N boys left town.

“Well,” he said slowly. “This.” He reached out for the cup and tipped it toward her again. It was almost empty. “If I don't see the bottom of this, the whole time, you paying—then maybe we can talk for a while.”

Someone was moving behind the bar now, and Lindsey put up her hand to them. Gerard tossed back the rest in his glass and set it down. When the man from behind the bar came over with a tall bottle, Lindsey put down three quarters. The man set the bottle on the table, put the coins in his apron, and disappeared. Lindsey pushed the bottle carefully just to Gerard’s side of the table. 

“Okay?” she asked.

Gerard nodded. “Okay.” He filled his glass, took a bracing swallow of whiskey, and pondered how to begin.

 

#### Gerard’s Story

The inconvenient fact of the story about the preacher man, something which made it awkward in the telling, was that it began somewhere entirely different.

Once the Bar N herd got to Abilene and the cattle were sold off, Frank and Gerard had tumbled into bed together the first chance they got. That first afternoon free of the cattle, while the rest of the drovers sauntered into saloons, Frank and Gerard stole away to a boarding house on a side street and bought two rooms without the intention of ever opening the door on the second one.

In the room, Frank tossed his hat on the washstand table and attacked his shirt with such ferocity that a button popped and rolled on the floor. Gerard hopped on one foot to get himself free of his boots and jeans. Undressed and wild, they paused a second and Frank gave a fierce laugh before they grabbed each other and went to. It was the slaking of a thirst that had been growing in them since before Oklahoma City—an aftereffect of the jokes and barbs traded over so many miles, the long stretch of night watches, alone together under the big sky when only they and the coyotes were awake. The last days of the drive whetted the feeling to a maddening edge as Gerard slowly realized Frank was sending back the same tiny signals Gerard was sending out, that it wasn’t an accident when Frank stood uncomfortably near him at the edge of the campfire, so close Gerard could feel the press of Frank’s gun holster against his hip. After the weeks and miles of this, it was all they could do to get the rented room’s door locked behind them.

The first time was a fun romp. They panted with laughter and Gerard marveled at how he could make Frank buck and squeal with the right touches from his hands or mouth. But the times after grew slower, deeper, sweeter, until, by the time white moonlight shone in the window, casting a long square over them still tangled together in the rumpled bed, Gerard felt himself clumsy and vulnerable as a new calf, amazed at the broken-voice sounds he made as their bodies slid together. He dropped to sleep satisfied, believing they had been born for this, he and Frank both.

He woke in the late morning with full sunlight slanting through the window. Late morning! On the trail they would’ve been up and fed and five miles into the day’s ride by now, and he’d done nothing yet but lie naked in a borrowed bed. Frank was pulling on some clothes to be decent as he walked down to the outhouse. He gave Gerard a rueful little grin as he buttoned his pants and slipped out the door.

Gerard sat up and scrubbed his fingers through his hair. Now that the frenzy of the evening was past, he was aware that the room reeked of sex and sweat. He stretched, stood for a moment, and then let himself flop back across the bed, spread-eagled. Every part of him had been kneaded hard like bread dough and twisted out of shape.

In his body, he felt delight. But he could sense a discomfort building in the back of his mind—twitching and stamping, impatient to make sense of what had happened or be quit of it. Gerard knew how to handle a horse giving the signs it was ready to bolt; he gave these thoughts a wide berth, hoping they would calm.

And so it was that Gerard tugged on his own clothes and boots and walked downstairs. It wasn’t quite a decision, more like a temporary bout of confusion. He stole away into to the day without seeing Frank again and let himself think nothing of it.

That day, Gerard wandered lazily in the town. He bought a shirt and a pair of cheap denim pants, suspecting that most of his other clothes were past the hope being clean again ever. In the bath house, he paid his dime and put down extra for soap, towels, and hot water. Standing at the edge of the metal tub in the back room, he hesitated before shedding his clothes, hoping there was nothing on his body that would show the other bathers he’d been fucked bowlegged the night before.

He walked to the laundry next, piling his clothes on the counter and giving a shy half-smile to the Chinese boy, only a little younger than he was, who came out to help him. The boy was wearing Chinese clothing that was strange to Gerard’s eye—a dark colored smock and a soft, close-fitting hat. His hair curled in untidy wisps at his ears and his neck was damp with sweat. Gerard could smell the steam and soap and hear the clattering and murmuring from the back where so many other people worked in the laundry. The boy flicked his eyes to the pile of clothes and then looked back at Gerard impassively. Gerard looked away, feeling color rise in his cheeks, and counted out a few coins from his pocket onto the counter. The boy swept up the coins and gathered up the clothes silently in his arms.

Gerard stared after the boy as he disappeared to the back of the building. When he turned, Gerard could see his long hair, braided in a long plait down his back. For an idle moment, Gerard felt himself submerged in imagining what it would be like to be a boy like that—long, shiny hair, longer than most women’s, and spending his days doing the women’s work of taking in other people’s washing, speaking an impossibly strange sounding language, and surrounded by other men and women for whom, apparently, the difference between men’s work and women’s work didn’t mean a thing.

But then, Gerard thought, he had decided to be a cowboy, and how well was that turning out? He could ride and he could shoot; he could carry a calf over his shoulders. He was nothing like his bookish younger brother who was still back east; he wasn’t scared of the sun or of a hard day’s work. He had the pay from his second drive in his pocket to prove it, and he had gotten up this morning out of the bed he’d shared with another man, who was also none of those things, not soft, not weak, not— Gerard shook his head. He could feel the horse in his mind starting to shift and stamp in agitation again.

By the afternoon, he had grown distinctly uncomfortable. He looked at himself in the mirror as he sat in the barber’s chair. The thoughts that had been gnawing at the corner of his mind were starting to edge forward and let themselves be seen. For all he or Frank had let themselves wish or imagine while they were on the trail, now they had gone and done something about it. But that wasn’t all of it, his worry over what they had done, Gerard thought. It was Frank—just Frank. It had almost been a full day, and they hadn’t spent this much time apart in two months. Being away from Frank was making him crazy, and yet here he was wandering the town acting lost as a maverick. The idea of Frank was a sore spot in his chest, and it was only getting more tender as the day wore on. Gerard hadn’t been in love before. He wondered if this might be it. It was an uncomfortable thought.

“Whatever it is you’re squirming about,” the barber cautioned him, “you’d best be still if you plan to keep both your ears.” 

That night, he went to the big saloon, The Dusty Rose, the one that had collected all the Bar N boys the day before, as well as the cowmen still in town from two other drives that had come in earlier that week.

He approached the doorway, coming under the swinging sign with the gentle light of twilight at his back and a feeling of reprieve from the hot day. As soon as he stepped in the doorway, he saw the Bar N boys lining the longest table, and Frank there at the end in his mashed up brown hat with the white feather in the brim. Frank turned toward him, face bright, split with that impossible grin of his, and waved Gerard over to the table as though he’d been expecting him to arrive this whole time.

Gerard went to him, and Frank slung his arm around Gerard’s shoulders and pulled him to sit close on the bench. Around them, the Bar N boys were laughing their way through—again—the story of Willie and his wolfskin coat. The wolfskin coat didn’t exist, and the story mostly consisted of taking turns teasing Willie for how many shots he had missed at the lone gray wolf that dogged the herd’s trail for five days before Red River.

Another roar of laughter rose up from the table, and Frank leaned close to Gerard’s ear.

“I thought you run off,” he said, low, so only Gerard would hear. “Except your saddle was in the room, and Mariah was in the stable.”

“I didn’t run off,” Gerard said, in the same low voice. He paused and steeled himself. “I won’t.”

Frank turned to look him full in the face and raised an eyebrow. “You won’t?”

“I won’t.”  Gerard said. “I wasn’t thinking right this morning. But I’m better now.”

Frank held his gaze for a moment and then turned back toward the noise of the saloon. Out of the corner of his eye, Gerard saw that Frank was nodding slowly to himself.  Gerard liked seeing that. He felt Frank’s shoulder warm against him.

They shouted and laughed and drank at the Bar N table for a while, playing along at the evening’s fun as the men from another ranch—Crazy R or somesuch—who joined the table and told about crossing Red River only a few days after the Bar N herd had, but after an early summer storm so the river was running high and fast. The table’s attention turned toward toward the new drovers and, in the eddy of silence left around them, Gerard leaned briefly into Frank, nuzzled his face into Frank’s clean hair, still a little damp, smelling sweet like dry junegrass under summer sun.

Frank laughed then, and leaned away from Gerard to shout something, a rough comment that made the rest of the cowmen guffaw and holler. Blue-eyed Sam slapped Frank on the shoulder and Frank took the brown hat from his head, swatting Sam in a friendly way and tossing the hat on the table. Underneath, shadowed by the broad brim, Gerard felt Frank’s fingers on his thigh, deliciously ticklish they walked toward his knee.

The night was so free and wild, the bar so full of drink and noise, that almost any kind of wild behavior could have been excused—almost anything, but not everything, Gerard knew. It would have been more seemly for him and Frank to get in a fistfight than to keep doing what they were doing in public, jammed together on a straight bench like the saloon was three times more crowded than it was, and Frank’s hat practically in his lap, covering his fingertips pressing through the rough denim of Gerard’s pants.

“Let’s go,” Frank said, nudging Gerard’s ribs with his elbow and picking up his hat. “Shouldn’t we move along?”

Gerard hastened up without argument and they followed some other men out the door and along the boardwalks. They were silent for a minute, and Gerard listened to the hollow sound of their boot heels on the walk and the creaking boards. Somewhere, there was the sound of music playing, little snatches of song he almost recognized. They passed a turn in the road where a handful of the men had drifted toward a side street.

“Do you—?” Frank cocked his head down the walk, in the direction the other men were going, toward the brothels.

Gerard almost laughed. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said lazily, letting his voice drawl a little. “Don’t believe I have much desire for that tonight. Not there, anyway.” He looked at Frank with as much intention as he could muster. Frank chuckled and looked away, rubbing his chin to hide his embarrassment. But then he looked back at Gerard and smiled a broad smile. Gerard slung his arm around Frank’s shoulder and Frank let himself be pulled in. Gerard could hear him take a deep breath.

“First time I been around you when you don’t smell like that horse of yours,” Frank said with a quiet laugh, very near Gerard’s ear. “No offense to Mariah.”

Gerard chuckled.

“Anyway,” Frank said, “You don’t clean up half bad.” He snorted. “Hope you burn them clothes, though.”

Gerard laughed. “You need to cut your hair,” he said, twisting his fingers in the curling ends ends of Frank’s dark hair and giving Frank’s head a gentle shake.

Suddenly a man stood in front of them on the board walk. Gerard pulled up clumsily to avoid stumbling into him—this man they somehow hadn’t seen until that moment. He let his arm fall quickly away from Frank’s shoulder. The man was taller than both of them. His weather-burnt face was set into stern wrinkles, and he had on a broad-brimmed black hat.

“What are you boys doing this evening?” the man asked. He turned and faced them, away from whatever errand he had been set toward, casting an eye up and down them. He wore a a string tie and a severe black coat

“Excuse us, sir.” Frank straightened his hat on his head, touching the brim sheepishly. “We were just having a little fun tonight.”

The man drew his eyebrows together under the brim of his hat, and he seemed to be considering them. Behind him in the darkening sky, heavy clouds massed together, even though the day had been hot and dry. The twilight air took on a chilly blue shade.

“You young men ought to be thinking about how to do the Lord’s work,” the man said. “Meeting’s about to start.” He cocked his head back toward a doorway in the next building that stood open in the breaking heat.

The sounds that had been hovering at the edge of Gerard’s awareness suddenly became clear—it was the murmuring of many different voices, friendly men and women gathered in a room, and, underneath, a piano plunking away to the tunes of hymns, the first step of gathering the prayer meeting together. This was the music he had heard. Warm light shone out the windows of the room where people were gathering, and Gerard felt something in him drawn toward the voices and the music.

“Will you join us?” the man asked. His voice was a little deeper than before and took on a stentorian tone that, even in asking a question, sounded as if it would brook no disagreement. The man’s voice tugged at him, and he could feel the power coiled there. He was a preacher, Gerard realized—likely the man who had called the prayer meeting together. Gerard quickly pulled off his hat and nudged Frank to do the same.

The man’s boots were clean, but they were riding boots. He was a circuit rider, then. The Methodist circuits reached out from the conferences in the East, threading their lines through the unorganized territories to the edges of the frontier. Gerard had heard that circuit riders would preach to anyone, anywhere they could gather a meeting—even to Indians in the mountains, or the French woodsmen in logging camps up north. Circuit preachers were a familiar enough sight in towns and on the road, but this man seemed bigger, more imposing somehow, than any preacher Gerard had ever seen, as though the trying wind and weather of his profession had hardened him into a pillar of stone.

“Honestly, sir,” Frank said from beside him, adjusting his hat that was still planted on top of his stubborn head, “I don’t put much stock in church teaching.” Gerard felt a bolt of alarm go through him. Usually, Gerard was charmed by Frank and his smart mouth, but in that moment, he felt afraid.

“Is that so, son?” the man said, in the same tone—asking a question that wasn’t a question.  Again, he seemed to give them an appraising look, eying Frank closely. “I pray you reorder your mind while you have the chance. The harvest is soon, and time is short.”

“Excuse us, sir,” Gerard said, making a clumsy apology for both of them, stepping away and pulling Frank with him with a hand on his belt.

The preacher man was silent as they turned away, but Gerard could feel his eyes on them. Frank jostled him irritably, shrugging off Gerard’s arm and flashing him a sharp frown as they started away.

“Remember,” the man called after them, “God is your judge, not me.” In the covered walk, his voice was magnified strangely against the wooden walls and floor.

Frank made an annoyed noise and started to turn, but Gerard grabbed his arm.

“Just you stop,” Gerard hissed under his breath. “Show some respect.”

Frank made another huffing noise, but this time in resignation as he let Gerard pull him away.  Gerard glanced back and saw the man, standing in the middle of the walk, stock still, looking after them. It was like he was forcing them away with his stern gaze, clearing them away like dust or rats from the walk where the meeting would begin. Behind him, the setting sun’s rays still tried to force their way between the heavy clouds that had gathered. Gerard jerked his head back around and pulled Frank along.

He thought he heard something else, other footsteps on the boardwalk behind them, but he didn’t dare look back again as they walked away.

 

#### How a Tale Changes in the Telling

Gerard sifted carefully through the facts of the story, considering what to tell this strange woman sitting across from him. He wasn’t eager to divulge more than necessary about his situation with Frank, but at the same time, deeper down, he was desperate to have someone else hear the events and share his concern. As often as he had mulled the disparate facts over in his head, it all seemed connected in a way—the preacher man on the boardwalk that night, the prayer meeting full of people that no one in town would remember afterward, Frank mouthing off to the man at the most inopportune moment, and how the man had glared after them, as though his warning about the coming harvest was something he spoke about with a special authority.

“Well,” Gerard began, clearing his throat and glancing again at Lindsey. “It was one of those nights after we got the Bar N herd into town. We had a couple days where the herd just sat, while the owner was bargaining with Chicago buyers for all three thousand head. After that, we saw ’em off at the railhead. The foreman paid us out that afternoon, and we were free.”

“The town was crawling with cowboys fresh off the trail, and all of us with three months’ wages burning a hole in our pockets. That first night, Lord, it was the first time I’d slept in a bed for three months. The first time getting clean in I don’t know how long. The horses safe in a corral near the edge of town, and I had got a room at the Drover’s Cottage. And Frank, my friend. He stayed there too. Across the hall,” Gerard clarified carefully.

He stole another glance at Lindsey. She was watching him with her cool, dark eyes. He filled up his glass a little further.

“That next day, it got to be evening, and all the cowboys—well, they went out walking. Whole town was full up with em, with two or three other drives come in earlier that week. We all found our way to The Dusty Rose and drank some drinks and tossed some dice, you know, the way you do when you’re ready to have a good time. There was,” Gerard chuckled at the memory. “There was already two fistfights that night, and some gunshots out in the street, but nobody was willing to pay it any of it any mind. It was just how the cowmen blow off steam, after so many nights on the trail with no one but the cows and each other for company.”

“Well, at the Dusty Rose, Frank and I figured we’d better clear out of there,” Gerard said, neglecting to offer any reasons as to why they had figured that was necessary.

“And we were walking down, south of the square, to the … brothels.” Gerard’s tongue stumbled on the word, and he wished he had thought to aim the story in a different direction before he got to this point, or taken care to paint out this detail too. “Excuse me, miss.” He cleared his throat.

“Excuse yourself,” Lindsey said coolly. “Any woman knows well enough about such places.”

“Well.” Gerard fiddled with the glass and the bottle for several long moments. “Well, anyway. We was walking, and we came on this man. He was just standing there on the boardwalk. I mean, sure, we weren’t paying attention like we shoulda been that night, but it was like he came out of nowhere.”

“We talked to him for just a moment. He asked us to go to the prayer meeting that was just getting ready to start, and Frank smarted off his mouth to him about not believing in no church teachings.” Gerard sighed. “I just wish he hadn’t. I got nothing against a preaching man.  I been to camp meetings and whatnot when I was younger, and I been saved a time or two myself, but this man—he had a bad look about him. He felt all wrong.”

“So finally I just pulled Frank away so we could get out of there. That annoyed Frank, but I didn’t want to talk to that man no more. But when we were walking away, I couldn’t help it—I turned and looked back at him. And he was standing out there, stock still, his eyes on us for no reason I could figure.”

“And after that…” Gerard searched his mind again for the ending to the story of that night, before the jail cell the next morning. He shrugged and looked at Lindsey.

“I don’t remember the rest. I guess I must of been drunker than I thought. I saw those rain clouds come in that night, and it’s like they covered up everything.” He made a vague gesture with his hands and sighed heavily.

“I woke up early next morning, and I was by myself. In a cell in the jail by the town square. Deputy told me some of the other cowmen brung me in, and I don’t remember that neither. Frank wasn’t nowhere to be found that morning or ever since. I don’t know what happened to him. I’m scared it was something bad, but, I mean, maybe he just—” Gerard swallowed. “Maybe he run off, even though I didn’t think he would.”

“But you don’t remember?” Lindsey asked, frowning. She peered at him like she had found something. Gerard shrugged again and didn’t answer. Lindsey waited, watching him like she thought he might say more.

Gerard looked at his hands and played with his glass some. Then he looked out the window for a while. Lindsey stayed quiet. Finally, Gerard conceded, “Well, there’s this other part. I remember it, but I don’t know if I dreamed it. I might of. It was an awful dream, if that’s what it was, and the preacher man was in it.”

“What was the dream?” She leaned toward him and rested her forearms on the table.

The blue pre-dawn sky, the clouds, the sound of the gunshot—all these things tumbled through Gerard’s mind in an instant. He set his jaw and he cleared his throat again.

“We were—well, I dreamed we were out in the town square. Me and Frank, and the preacher man was there, and these other men. I don’t know who they were, but it was like they belonged to him, to the preacher. They did whatever he said. He didn’t even have to say—he would just look at them, and they did what he wanted.”

Gerard stumbled through a rough recollection of the dream, ending with the sound of the gunshot. When he was finished, he looked at her. This time, he was the one waiting, searching her face for a sign that she believed him, that the jumbled mess of his story meant anything to her. She was silent, and seemed to be weighing his words. She looked away, over his shoulder, like she was imagining something, or putting something together in her mind.

“I knew a man once,” she said. “He was a lot like this preacher man you describe. I never could explain the evil things he could do.” She pulled her eyes back to Gerard. “This man—I understand he’s riding the circuits now, telling people he’s a preacher.

Gerard frowned. “He seemed enough like a preacher that night, being so quick to mention the state of our souls and all.” The memory was a distasteful one. “If he’s not a preacher, what is he?”

Lindsey shook her head slowly. “I can’t say rightly say what he is. I ain’t seen him in some time now. But that’s why I’m looking for him: to find out.”

She sat up, backing away a little from the moment of confidence they had shared.

“There’s a big camp meeting in Dodge City in three days. They have it the end of every summer. All the preachers off the circuits come and preach. I think he’ll be there. I plan to be there to, and I think you should come. Especially if you want to find out what happened to your friend.”

“Hm,” said Gerard. He nodded, and kept nodding as reached out to touch the bottle on the table, tipping it just a little. There was still liquor inside.

“We should leave tomorrow if we want to make it by Saturday night,” Lindsey said.

Gerard thought about several days on horseback, several days without a drink. It made him powerfully tired. “I’ll have to think on that,” he said.

 

The next morning, Gerard made his way unsteadily into the barroom, ready to begin his day in the way that had become customary. In the dusk of the deserted saloon room, he saw a figure leaning against one of the tables as she stood, long hair pulled back under a black hat. She turned to fix him with her calm gaze, and he could see the red bandana at her neck.

“Hell,” he said. “I thought I dreamed you. I was hoping I did.”

“The horses are out front,” Lindsey said. “Best get down your saddle from your room, along with whatever else you got.”

Gerard shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “Hell,” he said again.

 

#### The Road to Dodge City

The road that stretched west from Abilene was flat, its edges fading into the shortgrass prairie that looked about the same as south of Abilene had. It was early enough that the dew still stood in the grass and Gerard could smell the damp green smell of the prairie coming in from all around them.

He took a deep breath and tried to let the sweet air calm his nerves. In front of the Drover’s Cottage, Mariah had tossed her head and refused to look at him, shouldering him away when he first approached her with the saddle.

“She’s angry,” Gerard muttered, although it was clear no one was listening to him—Mariah least of all. Now on the road, even though she had eventually let him saddle her up, she had her ears pinned all the way back and acted like she was trying to ignore him, even as he sat on her back.

Lindsey had a little bay mare, young, but with a spirited set to her head. She kept a close eye on Mariah and Gerard, keeping at least one ear pointed toward them even when he rode behind her. Lindsey was easy in the saddle and the little mare set a respectable pace.

After a few miles, Gerard could feel Mariah relaxing into the pace of the steady walk, her gait and her muscles smooth under him as she gradually started to pay more attention to the road and the grass and the horizon, and less to staying angry with him and letting him know it. He patted her neck, smoothing her mane a little, and she flicked an ear back at him. He was starting to feel better.

He nudged Mariah ahead a few steps so he was even with Lindsey.

“You got my horse out?” he asked her. “You paid for her board?”

Lindsey glanced at him and gave a little shrug, almost imperceptible. “What you gave me in the poker game—that more than covered it. Your board and mine both, in fact.” A little look passed over her face, something that, had it approached her any more closely, might have been a smile.

“Where’d you get her?” Gerard nodded toward the bay mare.

“Bought her from a neighbor. About a year ago, when I left my hometown,” Lindsey said.

“And where’s that?” Gerard asked, feeling like he was nudging her carefully, testing her like he’d test a new horse, to see how she’d respond to a little pressure.

“Holly.  Right on the edge of the state of Colorado.” Lindsey answered.

“I heard of it.” Gerard nodded. Maybe he had heard of it. He couldn’t wholly discount all the things he’d heard and been too drunk to remember. He paused for a second before venturing, “You been on the road a year, you say?”

She looked at him and he knew he’d overstepped his bounds. There was a stretch of quiet, and the horses’ hooves fell softly in the dust.

“I told you,” she said, turning her eyes forward again. “I been looking for a preacher man.” After that, she was silent.

Gerard had hardly met anyone with as little to say as Lindsey. The cowboys he rode with always seemed to be working their jaw about something or other, and Frank would tease and make jokes all day and into the night until he was half-asleep. After a few more fruitless attempts to talk, Gerard let a little distance open up between the two horses, allowing Mariah to pull ahead and stretch her legs. He amused himself by talking to her, beginning with an elaborate apology for how long he had let her languish in the Abilene corral.

“I was selfish as a damned cat,” Gerard summed up, feeling his speech reach its apogee, his eyes growing a little wet with sincerity. “You deserve much better than a fool who would treat you like that. I just—” Gerard’s mind went for a second to the gnawing problem of Frank and his whereabouts, and he fell silent. Here they were on the road—him and Lindsey, this woman in a man’s hat and boots who would hardly string two words together for his benefit. He sniffed hard and, after a moment’s ponderment, gave up trying to convince Mariah of the logic of the situation. He started in on a song instead.

His voice was stiff and rusty from all the days he’d wasted at the Drover’s Cottage, and he would sing a verse and have to break off to hack and clear his throat, making Mariah snort and twitch her ears. She liked all the trail and herding songs well enough, so he figured she was laughing at him, in her way. Which he deserved, he thought. Frank had always enjoyed his songs too, both the ones Gerard knew and the ones he made up on the spot, and that never stopped him from laughing either.

“Where’d you learn those songs of yours?” Lindsey asked. She had approached a little closer while Gerard was singing, as though it wasn’t only the horses who were tendered by his voice.

“Oh, they’re cowboying songs mostly,” Gerard said. “There’s probably enough cowboy songs to last from here to Montana. But I got a song for about most anything, I suppose. Riding songs, walking songs, working songs. They just stick in my head. I know a lot of them church songs even. That was always my favorite part of the camp meetings I been to. Couldn’t give two figs about the Bible reading, but I did like it when everyone sang.” He shrugged, patting Mariah’s shoulder absently. “A song’s always good, no matter what kind. It makes the ride pass a little easier, or a lonesome night go a little faster.”

She nodded, her face not as hard and closed off as it had been earlier. He gave her a wink and started in on another song, a riding song about the trail, its stretching miles of curves, and the surefootedness of the horses.

There were few travelers on the road that day, and that night, when they camped, Gerard watched the sky fill with darkness and picked at a few more of the paper-wrapped biscuits that were in his saddle bag. The landlady at the Drover’s Cottage had seemed eager to pack them down with wrapped food from the kitchen for only a few coins. Gerard suspected her eagerness began when she understood his journey with Lindsey meant he would be leaving the rented rooms at the inn. Certain enough.

Lindsey ate and tended to her horse with only a few clipped words to him and bundled herself up to sleep quickly, leaving Gerard sitting by the fire and looking at the sky by himself, hearing the horses sighing and snuffling in the dark and letting the dying fire warm the bottoms of his boots. Soon enough, he banked the fire and rolled up in his own bedroll.

 

#### The Prayer Meeting

As they got closer to Dodge City, the roads got less empty. On the first day, they passed a rider or walker from time to time, most heading to Dodge City, as they were, and most of those going to attend the prayer meeting. It seemed to be as Lindsey said, that the meeting was large enough to draw an audience from miles around. More homesteads were in evidence. Plumes of smoke rose occasionally along the horizon, and Gerard couldn’t tell whether they were from houses masked by a dip or a roll in the prairie land, or from dugout houses disguised as hills with grass on their roofs. On the second day, Gerard and Lindsey approached and overtook a two-horse wagon. A man and a woman were in front on the bench seat, and the wagon bed was filled with a rowdy assortment of children, a jumbled set of matched dolls, from the oldest teenage boy, almost fully grown, down to the babe in arms bounced on the hip of the oldest girl. They all had the corn silk hair and broad faces of the man and woman driving the wagon, matched as much by their strong family resemblance as the fact that each one’s clothes, down to the tiny shapeless smock worn by the baby, appeared to be cut from the same bolt of sturdy blue-striped cotton.

Gerard greeted the man and woman and let Mariah walk amiably close to the wagon for a bit. Even Lindsey offered them a courteous nod as she pulled close enough to listen in on their conversation. The family lived on a homestead about twenty miles out from Dodge City, but they were coming in for the weekend of the prayer meeting. The man touched his hat and nodded in greeting but kept his eyes shyly on his horses’ ears. The woman was more talkative.

“We don’t come by much in the way of religious instruction out on the prairie,” she explained with a laugh. “And I want my little ones to grow up to walk with the Lord. We read the Bible every night, but it’s something else to have a preacher explaining the Lord’s word the way it ought to be understood.”

“Anyway,” she continued, “We ain’t been to town all summer. Our neighbors, too—we’ll see em there. Out on the land, closest one is eight miles away, and you can’t travel that far just on a whim.” She turned away from Gerard to squint at the horizon.

“Heard there’s gonna be some good preaching,” Gerard ventured. Was the man they were seeking someone that was known around these parts?

“Oh, yes,” she nodded enthusiastically. “It should be something, for sure. You get all those preaching men together and, I daresay, there’s a little bit of them that tries to outdo each other, even among godly men like that. Still, it’s all for the Lord’s work.”

They exchanged a few more friendly words and then Gerard and Lindsey let their horses’ pace carry them forward, beyond the wagon and the sounds of the shouting, bickering children.

 

They arrived in Dodge City before noon on Friday morning, put up the horses, and walked out into the field beside town where a wooden platform was already set up. Somehow, a piano had been hauled out there, and it stood on the edge of the stage with a canvas tossed over it to protect it from the sun and weather. Gerard stole up to the side of the stage and lifted the canvas and the piano’s fallboard. He tapped a few keys and smiled to himself as they rang quietly, muffled in the canvas. Lindsey waited for him to finish and return to her side so they could resume their slow walk through the field. She didn’t scold him or laugh at his antics, and Gerard continued to be puzzled about what to make of her. He had been playing for a laugh, if he was honest, but he would have settled for annoyance from her. In his experience, people who didn’t laugh tended to scold, but she didn’t seem apt to do either.

People milled in the field, talking and laughing in expectant high spirits. Some had gathered into small impromptu prayer groups scattered around the field’s edge. Under a shade tree just beyond the stage, a man read from his Bible to a collection of people sitting on plain parlor chairs that had been brought out from the dining rooms of the town to stand unsteadily in the short grass. Children screeched and chased each other in larger and larger groups as the day wore on. In the afternoon, they saw men from the town carrying out wooden benches, no doubt emptying every saloon room and public house, baring the the porch of every business along the town boardwalks, to collect enough seating for the crowds to come.

There were several preachers that night, and the benches filled partway up with listeners. The men who preached were nondescript—some stout, some small, most wearing the recognizable black hats and plain black jackets that were common among traveling preachers. Their words floated away into the night. Gerard sat with Lindsey in the back where there was space, each standing to pace or to wander at different moments in the evening, each privately discouraged by how little their search had yielded so far. Gerard listened to voice after voice, some kindly, some impassioned, none with the deadly heft of the man he and Frank had heard on the boardwalk in Abilene.

As the light got low and the crickets started to sing, Lindsey got up and walked away from the field back to town. Gerard followed her dispiritedly, his legs stiff and pained from the particular endurance required to stand still for so long, or to stroll directionlessly. Lindsey got a room at a boarding house in town, but Gerard left her at the doorway with a mumbled excuse about checking on the horses. The thought of sleeping in a rented room was too much like the Drover’s Cottage, and he worried he might slip too easily back into patterns he had only just shaken free of. It was three days now since he’d had a drink, and after a few nights under the sky, his head felt clearer. He didn’t want to jeopardize that by sleeping a night too near to a bar counter. Instead, he went back to where the horses were stabled, snuck past the night stableman, and tucked himself in for the night at the back of the hay mow.

Early the next morning, Gerard found Lindsey in the boarding house’s dining room, sitting on the raised hearth in the room that was otherwise empty of seating, its benches certainly having been lent to the meeting field the day before. She moved her hat to make a space for him to sit, one of the friendlier gestures she’d extended to him. He had slept well in the hay, and he gave her a quick grin, suddenly full of childish eagerness for the day to begin. She didn’t smile back, of course, but she nodded a bit and kept her eyes on him as he settled himself beside her, a peaceful, unhurried look on her face that Gerard might have described as nearing contentment. 

When they went out to the street, the moist, hot prairie air breathed against their faces and necks. The clear, blue-white sky was almost burned of color already, even as early as it was. Gerard surveyed the dusty street and felt his earlier enthusiasm falter. He sighed, resolving himself to a day of sweating into his hat and pulling his sticky shirt away from his arms and chest as it got wetter and wetter. Lindsey, too, appeared to be bracing herself for the day ahead of them, glancing at the horizon and the sky, her eyebrows pursed in a slight frown.

The town was filling up with visitors, and everywhere they stepped, Gerard found himself in the way people standing and walking—of young men with severely combed hair carrying Bibles in their earnest calloused hands, giddy couples who had come in for the prayer meeting like it was a square dance, parents trailing long lines of children like quail chicks. The more he had to excuse himself and touch his hat to make way for the crowds, the more he felt his reservoir of goodwill toward his fellow man being depleted.

The night before, the praying had been interminable, and this day promised to be no different. At every opportunity, people prayed for one another, murmuring quietly in pairs seated together among the benches or more heatedly in groups that focused their collective attention on one needy soul. There was an inexhaustible parade of concerns, every man or woman with a different tragedy from what Gerard could overhear, and an endless supply of impassioned brothers and sisters eager to intercede for them. Gerard himself had at different times throughout the day been forced to duck away from men or women who took his aimless walk and restless eyes as a sign that he was a searching soul in need of their attention. He excused himself hastily from each encounter, leaving behind the woman whose eyes were welling with tears of Christian compassion or the man who called after him about turning to the Lord. Lindsey appeared to handle it all with her usual aplomb, her eyes watchful and alert, nothing but calm self-assurance on her face. Apparently nothing in her demeanor betrayed enough ill-ease to attract the attention of the prayerful people.

The prayer-talk tired him—God this and God that, God bless, God forbid, as if God had the slightest concern about what was happening in this particular Kansas field. Gerard imagined that God looked on people about how he had looked on the cattle from Bar N. There were so many of them, a roiling brown lake, flecked here and there with a calf’s white-blazed face. He had a vague and general concern for their well-being, a charge to keep as many of them from wandering off or being set on by coyotes as he could, but beyond that, he could hardly tell one from the other, could never be sure if he was seeing the same one twice. And then at the end of the drive, they’d been sold into rail cars and borne bawling away toward the meat-packing plants of Chicago. Theologically, it didn’t paint a particularly hopeful picture.

The one redeeming sight during the day was that, by the look of the groups taking turns near the piano, there would be much more singing this evening. Enough songs, Gerard thought, and he might be able to last the night through. He lingered when the groups were practicing, picking out familiar hymn tunes, snatches of melody that floated back to him from the recesses of his past. The God talk bothered him less in songs, where it was smoothed and borne up by melody and the pleasing sound of human voices.

Later, across the field from the piano, he found himself paused by a group of sacred harp singers who were practicing for the evening. There had been plenty of sacred harp singing schools back east, and, he supposed, it was no surprise that the songs and their curious way of singing had rolled its way across the prairie flatlands like a tumbleweed. Songs were easy to carry. You could take them about anywhere you wanted.

Gerard listened as the group lay their voices down together in those curious droning chords. He didn’t prefer the way their songs seemed to drag, weighed down by all those voices joined together, slow enough that anyone could join in or keep up. It was nothing like how a lone cowboy could sing a traveling song that would pick up the feet of everyone in hearing distance. Still, there was something mysterious about the drone of their singing, the way their songs wove in and out between real words and the fa-sol-la syllables, switching suddenly from something comprehensible to something otherworldly.

A young woman with a high, clear voice led the group in Brightest and Best, her pure voice floating above the din of the field, above the treetops that surrounded them, as high as a star itself. It was eerily beautiful to hear, and it made the gooseflesh rise on Gerard’s arms as he listened. They sang the words about the beasts of the stall, which made Gerard think first of Mariah, and then of the cattle in the cars chugging toward Chicago. It needled him like all the God talk had come to that weekend. He pulled away from the singers quickly then and stumbled back across the field to find Lindsey again, to walk with her in companionable silence and let the song fade from his hearing.

As the day wore toward evening, more and more people came to the field, filing in among the benches and marking their seats with coats and hats. Preachers appeared periodically to pace the stage, looking out over the meadow and the crowds, anxiously opening their Bibles to reread verses or to mark a new reference.

Gerard kept his eyes on every figure that ventured onto the stage, but the fact that none were familiar didn’t seem entirely significant. The preacher he’d seen didn’t seem like a man susceptible to nerves, and Gerard would have been surprised to see him worrying before a crowd in advance of a sermon. There was still the evening—the longest string of sermons over the whole weekend. They hadn’t yet exhausted what the prayer meeting had to offer them.

The mood turned less church-like and prayerful and more decidedly festive as people kept arriving and the spirit of expectation grew. People abandoned their prayer circles to greet friends and neighbors, to stand and talk and be introduced to others who had come in for the meeting. Gerard and Lindsey passed a man who whooped drunkenly among his friends for the evening, none of whom seemed bent on quieting him and many of whom were more than a little tipsy themselves.

As they turned and walked along the edges of the field, near to the large trees that crowded at its edge, they could clearly hear the unmistakable grunts and breathy gasps of a couple engaged in a pursuit decidedly less than holy among the trees.

Lindsey glanced in the direction of the sounds and then back toward their path. “Well,” she said. “That doesn’t sound much like Bible study.”

Gerard snorted, clapping his arm across his face to stifle his laughter, as much at her dry reaction as at the brazen spectacle of a public fuck only a few steps off the path at a crowded gathering. It hardly seemed incongruous with the atmosphere of festivity that was building in the field.

Lindsey turned back toward the benches, with none of the gaiety of the evening—none of the humor of her wry joke, even—showing in her face. “We’d best find a place to sit. I expect it’ll start before long.”

The evening began with several preachers who ran together a bit in Gerard’s mind. There was the pink-cheeked young man who spoke about God’s eternal love and showing kindness toward your fellow man. There was a the preacher with a thin, bookish face and spectacles that he kept fiddling with, taking them on and off, who gave a relatively incomprehensible message from Nehemiah about rebuilding the temple. There were others, and the crowd was cheerful, if occasionally inattentive, through them all.

Then the stage was empty for a bit. The noise of the crowd increased as they grew restless, as they forgot any pretense of praying or studying and instead grew hungry for more entertainment. Gerard felt his own tension rising too, raw with the irritation of boredom and fruitless waiting. He stood from the bench where they were seated near the back and walked back again to the trees at the edge of the field, scuffing his boots in the grass.

On the stage, a man climbed the rough steps at the side and walking out onto the boards, surveying the crowd who hadn’t turned their eyes on him yet. He was tall and solidly built, and there was a commanding set to his shoulders. He reached to take his squarish black hat from his head and held it in his hands. Gerard’s breath caught. Even at a distance, he recognized the stern face of the man they’d encountered in Abilene.

Gerard’s first thought was: _He’s real_. And his second thought, cold in his stomach: _Frank_.

The preacher man held his hat and turned his face slowly across the crowd, and Gerard felt the last remnants of his hope flutter away, the hope that he would see this man, the man they had met for such an inconsequential instant in Abilene, and realize everything inside him had been a dream, a product of the Dusty Rose’s whiskey and his own need for answers. He had wanted to see the man’s familiar-but-unfamiliar face and finally understand that Frank was in San Antonio, had left him for no reason, and to know that he could abandon for good the crazy fantasy that Frank was somewhere and needed rescuing.

Gerard’s stomach was cold, and he felt like he was choking on his own breath. The night air, cooling unaccountably after the blazing heat of the day, felt charged with electricity, as though lightning was lurking somewhere just over the horizon, hidden in the blue clouds that were drifting in on the night breeze. He made his way slowly back to the edge of the rows of benches and Lindsey was suddenly at his shoulder. Her eyes were on the stage.

“That’s him, isn’t it,” she said in a low voice. It was hardly a question.

“It is,” Gerard murmured, giving her a quick glance. “And you? Is it who you were looking for?”

“Afraid so,” she said. Her mouth was a thin line. The crowd had begun to quiet under the weight of the man’s gaze, more and more eyes turning toward the stage. The quiet spread as people saw their neighbors listening and turned their own eyes forward.

The faces of the people were illuminated in a curious blue light. A cool breeze, nothing at all like the damp heat of the day, moved across their upturned faces. Then the preacher man began his sermon.

“Brothers and sisters,” he said. His voice was deep and rang in the night air. Somehow, Gerard could hear him far more clearly than any of the other preachers that evening, even standing at the back of the field. The crickets and cicadas that had filled the evening air with their buzzing seemed to be falling silent. The crowd grew stiller. The sky grew darker. 

The black hat Gerard had seen in his hands moments before had disappeared, and the man held his empty hands out to the people, gently, in supplication. “My brothers and sisters, it is the Lord’s will that we are gathered here tonight. That each of us has been called here from the highways and byways of life—this is a mark of how God welcomes each one of us to play a role in His perfect plan. God’s work is already begun, and we each have a part to play in bringing it to its glorious conclusion.”

He paused. The night air around them was silent. “It is a glorious thing, my brothers and sisters, to be part of such a plan—a plan greater than you or I can understand.”

Gerard looked at the men and women sitting on the benches as the preacher man continued to speak. _Brothers and sisters_ , he intoned, and they leaned in a little further each time. _Glorious_ , he said, and people shifted in their seats, a furtive curiosity coming onto their faces, a greed to find and capture for themselves the glory he dangled before them. Children were quiet, sitting on the grass or leaning against mothers’ knees, bright eyes turned toward the sound of the man’s voice.

“God’s ways are not our ways,” the man said. “God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, and we are foolish to think that we can comprehend them. In His hand, He holds a plan vaster than you or I can understand with our small minds. God intends all things for the good, we can be assured of that. And all that is required to make it real is our faith. That we give ourselves over to Him, that we follow His ways and heed His call in our lives. This is all that it takes to make it real. We don’t need to understand. We simply need to have faith to claim our reward.”

The man went on, and Gerard felt the reality of God and His plan growing uncomfortably palpable in the night air. It was like the fingers of a giant hand that encircled them—holding them comfortably now, but more than capable of crushing them if it chose. And who could know? If God’s ways were so far from human ways, who could know what would cause them to be crushed in the fist of God’s righteous judgment?

He looked over the rest of the crowd, trying to see if anyone else was as unsettled as he was by this feeling. In the rapt expressions around him, Gerard only saw their desire for the words the preacher man kept repeating: glory, order, a plan, a reward. _A reward_ , he thought. _The reward for living right._ He understood why they wanted it. Suddenly, he wanted it too.

Gerard could feel the glory and the comfort of surrendering to such a plan. It was like his father buying an insurance certificate from the bespectacled man in a black suit who loitered at his shop counter, eying the counters and cases, the walls and the ceiling beams, musing over what a tragedy it would be if something happened to the store. How could you sleep at night, the man asked his father as Gerard stood listening, invisible among the shelves beyond them on the floor, knowing you could have done something to prevent it? It was a way to keep yourself safe and blameless, to save yourself from wondering if you’d done the wrong thing—if it was wrong that you’d left your parents and brother just because you didn’t want to spend your days behind a shop counter, if it was your foolishness, your own, that had somehow caused Frank to disappear. God’s plan didn’t include doubts like these, Gerard was certain of it.

“But what?” The man asked, and his voice snapped in the cool air. Several women around Gerard gasped softly. “What keeps us from the path that God in His goodness has laid out for us?” He paused ominously, and the blue night air filled up with horrible possibilities.

“Vanity,” the preacher man said, and word was crushing. “Our own sin and prideful spirits. The pretty, meaningless things we attach ourselves to in this life. The pride we show when we believe our way is the best way. The way we chase our own desires—desires rooted in selfishness and our own wayward spirits. All these are human vanities, and they all keep us separated from God and His glorious plan.”

“None of us have God’s view. None of us see what God intends. But we still say to ourselves that we can see what’s right. We have the gall to follow our own instincts. We have the pride to assert our own wills. Even in small ways, in our doubts, our reservations, our questions—behaving as though somehow God owes us an explanation for His ways.”

“And sometimes we try,” he continued. “We intend to be holy and to follow God’s way. We intend to keep a pure heart. We may try—even if we try!—we always fall short.”

 Gerard felt his brows furrow and his own vanities sprang to mind. His life, only nineteen short years, seemed small, but it was spilling over with things he had done wrong. _Always_ , he thought— _I always fall short_. He bit his lip, and tears pricked at the corners of his eyes. Lindsey shifted beside him, and he felt her hand on his arm.

“Stop,” she said. “Don’t do this now.”

He turned to her, confused. The preacher man’s voice rang in his ears.

“Stop it,” she said again, and gave him a shake.

For a moment, Gerard was aware of his own breath, like he had started breathing again after having stopped for too long. He looked down at her hand on his arm and then up to her face. Her dark eyes were piercing in the low light.

The preacher man continued. “And because of this,” he said, “Because we always fall short, we have to choose again and again—to repent.” The word—repent—rang in the night in its awfulness. Gerard felt the word to the soles of his feet. The word lashed over the field like a whip, and beyond Lindsey, Gerard could see the crowd wilt under it. He knew that the quailing he felt inside himself, the awful fear and uncertainty, was there because it had been awoken by that voice.

“Amen,” came a voice from the benches. “Amen,” called another, louder. Gerard could see a woman nodding and nodding, tears shining on her face from the light that bathed the stage. Around her, the same light shone on hundreds of upturned faces.

“Give up your vanity,” the preacher man called, and his voice soared over them in the darkness of the sky. “Give up your sinful ways. Devote yourself to the Lord, say yes to Him again and again.” The crowd shifted and listened even more intently. He was offering them a way out, an escape from their vanity and wrongdoing. 

“Listen!” he cried. “Listen to His voice. Hear His call, and let go the things that keep you from him. Find those things—find them! And give them up. Search your heart,” he said ominously. “You know what they are. You know that the things you cling to are what keeps you from God.”

Gerard felt Lindsey at his side, but somehow, he was looking at the stage again, listening. _The things I cling to_ , he thought. Everything closest to his heart—letting go those things felt impossible. It felt like picking out all the tiny stitches that held together the patchwork of his soul. But he would find a way, he thought, feeling a resolve building in himself. He would find a way to give them up.

Next to him, Lindsey made a huffing sound, shifting like an annoyed horse. “I got to do something,” she said darkly, half to him and half to herself. She was looking at the stage, frowning. The set of her jaw and her brow was like someone had cheated at the card table and she was about to set them to rights, nothing at all like the contrite and pleading faces around them.  “Wait for me at the stable.” She stood up, and people leaned urgently around her to keep their eyes on the stage.

“And you,” she turned back on him quickly, grasping his shoulder and giving him another shake. “You got to keep your head. I mean it.” The look on her face was fierce, and Gerard was frightened by her, cowed as he was by everything the preacher man had said.

She started away to the side of the field, finding her way among the benches and the people filling them. There seemed to be some kind of break in the sermon then. Gerard rubbed his face and looked over the heads of the crowd, trying to see what was happening.

The man’s voice came again, low and gentle this time, caressing them, offering comfort. “You can give them up. You know what they are. You can find the things that separate you from God—and give them up.” Gerard heard it like the man was murmuring into his ear.

There was movement at the side of the stage, and men were coming out from behind the platform. Gerard watched them and felt his heart pounding in his ears. The men walking across the field and into the crowd were the goons from his dream, the men who had pulled his arms behind him and shoved Frank on the ground. They filed out into the crowd, orderly and intent. Each one carried something in his hands—the black hats Gerard remembered from the dream, or shapeless sacks. He cast his eyes nervously over the crowd, wishing Lindsey hadn’t gone. On the stage, the preacher man stood to the side, and a choir was coming forward.

“Gerard,” a man’s voice said softly behind him.

Gerard felt it before he even turned to lay eyes on him—the familiarity of Frank’s nearness washed over him like a wave. Frank was dressed in a clean white shirt, his hair short and neatly combed. In his hands, he held a crisp black hat, nicer by far than the sad, mashed brown hat with the white feather.

“Frank!” Gerard cried, but his voice turned out more of a gasp or a squeak, drowning in the sound as the choir started to sing.

Frank had his face down and gave his head a little shake, like he was telling Gerard no.

“Frank, Christ almighty.” Gerard put his hands out, thinking he would grab him, keep him, make him look him in the eyes. Once he shook that hat out of Frank’s hands, things would surely begin coming to rights.

“Be quiet,” Frank said in a low voice, pulling away. A frown pinched his face, but he stood calmly. He reached in front of Gerard and handed the black hat, upturned with its wide mouth open, to the man sitting beside him on the bench.

The hat bobbed away along the row of people, and Gerard watched. It moved slowly from hand to hand, pausing as men felt inside their jackets and shirt pockets, women reached into the ties of their aprons. A man twisted a thick ring from his finger and dropped it in. Another man produced a fistful of paper money, letting the roughly folded pieces slide into the hat’s open mouth. As it moved down the line, Gerard saw things fall from people’s hands into the hat, large things, too many things—a brooch that a woman unpinned hastily from her going-to-town dress, handfuls of coins, a pocket watch, a small gold nugget or what looked to be. It all disappeared inside the hat, which showed no heaviness or sign of getting full. It made Gerard’s head feel strange and buzzy, seeing those things disappear. He wrenched himself away from the spectacle of the unnatural hat and back to Frank, who, equally improbably, was standing beside him. Gerard saw the silhouettes of other men standing throughout the crowd, watching other hats moving down other rows.

Frank kept his face averted, but he put his hand heavily on Gerard’s shoulder and squeezed it tight.

“I saw you in the crowd,” Frank murmured, still looking after the black hat. “I don’t know how I saw you—but Gerard, I never been so glad to see anyone in my entire life.”  He kept his voice low but didn’t bend toward Gerard’s ear at all. He didn’t to show that he was talking to someone, Gerard realized.

“Frank, what the hell, you got to come with me, right now,” Gerard said, attempting to stand and take Frank’s arm again.

Frank pushed Gerard roughly back to the bench before he could rise. “Stop it,” he hissed. “Don’t touch me, and don’t make no scene. It ain’t no good if anything gets heated during the offering, I promise.”

Gerard tried to look at him, but Frank kept himself turned away, always casting glances back toward the stage where the preacher man had stood.

“I have to keep moving,” Frank said, still in that low voice. “Could you—Gerard, just walk near me. Just stand. Quiet, though, like there wasn’t no scene going on.” He started away, following the hat as it moved in the crowd, bobbing from hand to hand. He walked slowly, bracing himself as though he was being pulled by a strong wind, and it was only by a great exercise of will that he wasn’t pulled away faster. Finally, he managed a glance at Gerard. There was desperation in his eyes.

Gerard jumped up, and then immediately hunched back down, trying to mimic Frank’s nonchalance, standing near him as quietly as he could, resisting the feeling that he wanted to run, to grab Frank and pull him away, to run and run until they were far away from this mess.

Each row he paused at, Frank managed to choke out a few more words, and Gerard stood near him, anxious, straining to catch what he said, fighting his own desire to shout and to shake him, to do any wild thing he could to make this thing stop. The music from the choir moved around them and Gerard wanted none of it.

“He got me, Gerard. He got me good,” Frank said in a low voice. 

“Frank, no—” Gerard began, but Frank shook his head. He took the hat from one set of hands and passed it to another. Gerard quailed each time Frank had to touch the unnatural hat. After passing down so many rows and catching so many coins that danced out of people’s hands, it was still empty.

“Just listen, Gerard, damn it,” Frank said. “We’re going south. I heard them talking. We’re going south next, to the very edge of Oklahoma. Cimarron County. Some mountain there, Black Mesa.”

“Frank, no! What is this?” Gerard broke in, whispering urgently. “What the fuck is it? How can he do this to you?”

Frank ignored the question. Instead, he continued in a small voice, stepping forward calmly to the next row, “I need you to come for me. Can you do that?” He took a deep breath and the hat was in his hands again for a moment. “I don’t know how else I’m gonna get out of here.” His voice cracked and he shook his head again, as if trying to clear his vision. “We been all over the territories. I can’t even tell you the places we’ve been, but I can’t leave. Even though I want to.” People around them were singing, wiping their eyes. No one seemed to notice Gerard and Frank.

“The fuck, Frank,” Gerard hissed, hands twitching to grab him again. “Let’s just go now!”

A new song rose behind them, the choir and its knot of sincere voices. _Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves._ Frank glanced at the stage with a worried look. “Not now, Gerard, trust me. Not after he’s been preaching.”

Gerard put his hand up and Frank shrugged away again. “Don’t touch me, I told you. He’ll see you too, and you don’t want that. Let go of me, and get out of here.”

“Frank!” Gerard said, pleading, finding the courage to raise his voice a little.

The hat was back in Frank’s hands. Frank folded it against his chest and shot a glare at Gerard.

“Don’t you dare follow me,” he said. “I got to go.”

Frank turned and walked away toward the stage. Gerard watched him go, stunned. The air around him was swimming with music and the sounds of people rousing themselves after sitting and listening to all the preaching—the sounds of them coming to life again after being in the still, eerie thrall of the sermon. Frank fell in among the other goons slipping away behind the stage. Frank was the shortest, and the sight of him mixing in and disappearing among those evil men made something awful squeeze inside Gerard’s chest. He thought fleetingly about following them, wrestling Frank away from them there in the field while everyone looked on. But his stomach was cold remembering what the goons had done to him, to them both, in the dream, and so he stayed standing where he was.

People were standing now, moving and walking, starting to talk to one another again. Children were waking up—some to laugh and dart among the adults, some to wail forlornly in the fading evening light, clutching at their mothers’ skirts.

Gerard was filled with rage now, furious with all these foolish people—people who would listen to a man talk and agree blindly, nodding and calling out Amen, and not seeing how he had them and what he made them do, somehow not seeing everything they had willingly, thoughtlessly handed over to him that night.

And that voice. Gerard felt sick remembering it. He was furious at it, at how it wound around them and tied them up, furious at himself for listening although he couldn’t imagine how he could have avoided it. He clenched his fists at his side, scanning the crowd frantically in the twilight. Where was Lindsey? He was lost over what to do next, but he was certain she would know. She would have a plan of some kind, now that they had found him—this man, this creature, this unnatural thing.

 

#### Lindsey Confronts the Preacher Man

Gerard walked toward the stage because Lindsey had walked in that direction when she got up, when the man was still preaching, although God knew where she was now. Gerard made his way among all the people who were standing, talking, embracing, their interactions seeping with the sincerity that the man’s sermon had somehow called up in all of them. He gave them a wide berth, not wanting so much as to brush against a person who had been so moved by the sermon. He ignored that he himself had been brought to tears by the man’s words, before Lindsey had shaken him awake.

As he rounded the corner of the stage, he saw them. Lindsey had her black hat in her hand and was facing the preacher man. Her frame was small in comparison to his, and they stood set against each other in an unfriendly way.

Gerard looked at them. Her skin was still pale and smooth, where his was weathered dark and wrinkled, but they had the same shiny black hair. Gerard could see the stern, haughty set to the man’s face. It was similar to the hard look Lindsey wore most of the time, as though he was seeing what Lindsey would come to look like if she wore the same look on her face for a lifetime.

People were moving around them, tidying up at the conclusion of the night’s meeting, taking down lanterns, brushing off the stairs with a rough broom. Gerard glanced around furtively. The goons were nowhere in sight. He couldn’t quite understand why the preacher man would be without them, standing here in the field. But perhaps they were somewhere else packing away the impossible trove of riches they had stolen from the crowd. Everything that had gone into those hats had surely gone somewhere, and perhaps the goons were there now, perhaps Frank was there, dealing with the ill-begotten offering.

The man stood over Lindsey, and Gerard realized he was laughing at her. Scraps of their conversation floated to him on the night air.

“Girl, I never would have believed it,” the preacher man was saying, shaking his head in amazement. “I thought, no way it could be you—but then I saw how angry you are. I recognized that.” He looked her up and down. “You’ve sure grown up, haven’t you?” The way he spoke to her had an uncomfortable familiarity. “Wish I could say you looked like a lady.” His tone had a slight air of accusation to it.

In all the moments so far that he had watched her face, Gerard believed that Lindsey looked imperious, proud, powerful and calculating. He didn’t even know how old she was, but now, faced with this man, she looked sullen, petulant, like a girl being scolded for disobedience. The man held her in his gaze for a moment, then turned away, disgusted.

“What are you here for, anyway, girl? Surely, you ain’t decided to get saved.” He spoke dismissively, mocking her. His voice had none of the resonance he spoke with when he was preaching, the way he had goaded the crowd or commanded and enticed Gerard and Frank on the boardwalk.

“Saved?” Lindsey said, and laughed a sharp, bitter laugh. “No, not saved. That ain’t what you really do, though. We both know that. No,” she continued. “I come to get something from you, something you owe me.”

She had been standing with her arms crossed. She uncrossed them and a pistol was in her hand. It was a derringer, small and sharp, easy to hide among clothes yet as capable as Gerard’s rifle of dealing a fatal shot. The man snorted, still visibly annoyed, but he didn’t resume his teasing. He looked between the gun and Lindsey’s face, cautious. The little gun rested calm and alert in her hand, and Lindsey had regained some of her composure.

The man said softly to her, “Something I owe you? You’re growing up like your mother, you realize that? Believing you’re owed things. Believing you have a right to moan and complain when life turns out different than what you’d like.”

Gerard felt a growing sense of awfulness in what the man was alluding to, the way that he and Lindsey obviously knew each other.

The man went on, leaning in. “Thing is, you don’t understand about being called to something higher.” He fixed her with his dark eyes, looked into her face, seeming for that moment to be bent on convincing her of something. “I can lead people. I can change them. I liberate them from their vanity, call out their pride. I shame them with reminders of God’s righteousness. That’s what I do.” His voice started to change, take on the size and heft it had when he was preaching. “I tell them about their sin,” he said, “And it lets me lead the mightiest, angriest man, or the proudest woman, by the nose like a ringed bull. If I can do that, I can have anything I want.”

Lindsey was shaking her head. “You treat them all like that,” she said. “Good or bad, you say those horrid things to anyone. You talk about sin when you have no idea what anyone’s done or had to do.” Next to his, her voice sounded weak and wavering.

“God’s sake, girl,” he snapped. “As if I know or care what’s in their hearts. They know it all—and they are tormented by guilt. That’s why they’re so easily led.” He slapped his hand against his thigh, punctuating what he was saying, as though he was telling the punchline to a joke. “Haven’t you read the Good Book, girl? It ain’t our job to separate the wheat from the tares. God does that. I just bring in the sheaves. I bring em all in, every last one I can get my hands on.”

Gerard remembered the song the choir had been singing when Frank had walked away, been snatched away by the wind that seemed to pull at him— _bringing in the sheaves_. All of it, Gerard could see—the hats and the offering they gathered, the crowd’s rapt attention, even Frank himself—all of it was part of the preacher man’s terrible harvest.

“We saw you preach,” Lindsey said, and her voice, smaller than his, was still able to tug Gerard away from his thoughts. “We saw what you did and what you said—all those people, and everything you took. It was disgusting.”

The man scoffed. “Lot of people saw me preach, girl. That’s how it works. And do you know what? The only one angry about any of it is you. Every other one is glad I preached to them, glad I called them up and pointed them toward something better. They’re _glad_ they gave up something that kept them from God. They rejoice over it.”

“And now you come around, saying I owe you something.” He turned from her and spat on the ground. “Don’t hang on my coattails, girl, I got nothing for you.”

He turned and looked up to where Gerard was standing at the corner of the stage. “You or your unsubtle friend,” he said.  Gerard realized suddenly that the man was talking about him, had had his eye on him the whole time he had stood there watching him.

The man turned briskly from her and started away over the short grass. Panic washed through Gerard’s chest and he knew he should do something—move toward the man to threaten him, or away from him to flee, something. But he was unable even to get his feet to shift position. The man looked at him with a sneering, appraising look, as though he had seen him fully and judged him already. Gerard shrank away from him ineffectually, feet still rooted to the ground.

The man wasn’t walking a path that would bring him near to Gerard. At his nearest, he was still five feet away, but he put his hand out, as though Gerard was much closer and he meant to shove him away. Gerard felt pain blossom in his forehead. The ground was against his knees suddenly, then the field grass pressed into his shoulder and the back of his neck. Then there was nothing else.

 

For a long time, everything was quiet. After a time, Gerard came to a quiet awareness of Mariah’s long stride under him, her smell, the most familiar things in the world to him. He felt her rough mane in his fingers. His neck and head hurt, and the horn of his saddle had been pressing into his belly for some time.

His eyes fluttered open. Mariah was following the bay filly obediently as she and Lindsey walked ahead of them on the road. He glanced to where the sun stood in the midmorning sky. They were riding west, the city somewhere behind them. He started to turn, but stopped when the motion made his head pound and swim.

“Lindsey?” he called hesitantly. His voice was weak and cracked.

In an instant, she fell back to walk beside him. Her cheeks were streaked with light and dark, and he understood dimly that she had been crying.  The streaks were from wiping her tears away, dirty hands on a dirty face, everything dirty as the road was, filled with dust and grit. But when she spoke, her voice gave no sign of it.

“How you feeling? You awake, you think?”

“I—where are we?” He struggled again to look around.

“About six hours out of Dodge City,” she said and then lifted her chin toward the horizon before them. “Going west, to Holly.”

He pondered clumsily. His head hurt. “That place you’re from?” he said eventually.

“Yup.” She nodded. “Shouldn’t be more than a day or two.” She looked at him, and concern creased her brows. He could see she was evaluating him. How bad was it, he wondered? He put up one hand to touch his forehead and temples gingerly, but he didn’t feel anything. Everything that hurt must be on the inside.

“Here.” She tossed him his hat from where she had it sitting over her own saddle horn. He caught it and resettled it carefully on his head.

“We can stop soon and get some real sleep,” she continued. “I didn’t want to wait in that town, not while he was there. And, well.” She paused, seeming to decide how to say something. “Wasn’t no sense in us resting until I knew whether you’d wake up or not,” she concluded. “Thought I should just get us out of there.”

Gerard took a quiet, surprised breath, amazed at how serious everything had become.

“How did you—?” He looked around clumsily, taking in the situation he was in—himself in the saddle, Dodge City hours behind them, and the road beneath Mariah’s hooves, shaky and distant past his knees and the tips of his boots. “How did we—?” Mariah was tall, but today, the ground seemed even farther away than usual. He was gripped with the sudden, irrational fear that he would fall from the saddle, something he hadn’t done in years.

“She lay down,” Lindsey said. “On the ground. I didn’t ask her to, she just did. She saw you were in a bad way, I guess. Which you were.”

Gerard marveled silently. He felt suddenly able to remember fitful images of being shoved and bundled onto Mariah’s back. He wasn’t large as men went, but Lindsey certainly wasn’t any bigger. He frowned, imagining her heaving him about. Only a time or two had he moved someone who wasn’t conscious, usually with help, and it wasn’t easy. In the flashes of uncertain memory, he could hear Lindsey’s low voice, soothing and steady, _let’s go, come, darling, come on now_. A litany of gentle words, like he’d say to Mariah when he was coaxing her to do something she didn’t much want to. He began to be certain those words had been her talking to him.

“There wasn’t nobody I could ask for help, and I didn’t want to attract any more attention while the place was still crawling with his goons,” Lindsey said wearily. “You got her to thank for the fact that you ain’t slung over her back face first, like a sack of grain. Though I doubt I could’ve even managed that without her help.”

“Good horse you got there,” she said, concluding the story of their flight from Dodge City as she had told it, in a massive understatement. Mariah flicked an ear back at the both of them, as though acknowledging that they were speaking about her. 

Gerard rubbed her black neck, feeling tears prick behind his eyes at the thought of Mariah kneeling, laying down on the ground. Now that he was more awake, he could feel it in his creaking muscles, how long they’d been in the saddle and how much work his body had done for him silently, keeping him there. The weariness he felt made it feel like things were slipping from his hands.

“My head hurts,” he said, cranky and too loud. He rubbed at his face, trying to stave off the tears he knew were coming. He gulped a small breath and then, unbidden, the words were coming out of him.

“Lindsey, my friend, I saw him,” he said to her, and then he was choking back sobs. “Frank—I saw him there, and he was with them. That man had him, and he wasn’t himself. It was horrible.” 

Then he wasn’t able to speak anymore, and he wept into his hands, head pounding, bent over Mariah’s neck. Once he had really started, he felt as little embarrassment at crying in front of Lindsey as he felt in front of Mariah. He had no fear that she would react to his rage and sadness anymore than she had reacted to his childish cheerfulness or his songs. She was quiet beside him, and soon he was finished. The tears seemed to clear his head a little.

“What is he?” Gerard asked finally, when his voice was under his control again. “What do you want with him?” He asked it, even though he already knew. He had seen the pistol in her hand.

“Hush, now, don’t worry,” Lindsey said absently. They were calming meaningless words, like she’d say to a horse. She had turned her eyes far away from him and looking toward the horizon where Holly lay.

 

#### The Holly Blossom

They stopped in the early afternoon and stayed the night through in one place. There was a creek and a copse of brushy trees a short distance off the road. The horses lazed and wandered by the water. When he woke up the next morning, Lindsey was already up and moving around their little camp. She knelt by him and wouldn’t let him stand up until she held his chin and peered seriously into his eyes for several long moments, although he didn’t know what she was looking for. Finally, he twisted away from her.

“I’m fine, I’m feeling better,” he said, and it was mostly true. His headache had worn off and he wasn’t so dizzy.

Gerard could see the shadow of buildings on the horizon at the end of the second day. He assumed his view of the town of Holly would grow larger as they approached, but it didn’t. He saw the signs of homesteads and ranchland around it as they neared—cabins nestled behind windbreak trees, barns and corals with cattle chutes. It was a ranching town, Lindsey had explained, named after Hiram Holly, the local cattleman. But riding into Holly, Gerard realized the town itself was nothing more than a few buildings bunched together like a flock of underfed hens. There was a tiny stretch of boardwalk that connected a post office, one small store, a few nondescript buildings, and precious little else.

They tied their horses at the short hitching post by the boardwalk in the growing twilight, and Gerard followed Lindsey toward one of the buildings at the end, nearly matching her sure stride. Next to the door, there was a tin sign that said The Holly Blossom, with a plain four-petaled flower on it. Under the flower, in neat small capitals, it said Brothel. Under that was a list of prices.

Gerard’s step faltered as he took in the sign, and somehow his feet tangled on the walk and he found himself stumbling into Lindsey’s shoulder. He muttered an apology as she turned sharply toward him, but he also managed to cast her an urgent questioning look, cutting his eyes toward the sign.

She turned to him. Her gaze was always cool, but standing in the doorway of the Holly Blossom, it had a particularly chilly edge to it. Her silence and her raised eyebrow dared him to speak, even as he felt the words fleeing from his lips. She turned back to the doorway and the sign, to which she gave a friendlier look than she had just turned on him.

“I expect you’ll want to keep your mouth shut while we’re here, mostly,” she said, and pushed open the door.

They stepped into a hallway bathed in warm, low light. An upholstered couch stood on one side of the hallway, set forward toward the door. Beyond it, a curtain hid the doorway to the rest of the house. On the opposite side, a staircase led to a railed walkway above them set with doorways to multiple upstairs rooms. Lindsey steered him toward the couch and they sat down. Gerard sank awkwardly into the soft cushioning next to her.

In the next moment, a girl appeared from behind the curtain, and Lindsey fairly leapt from the couch to go to her. The girl gave a squeal of recognition and reached her hands out to take Lindsey’s. The couch, relieved of Lindsey’s balancing weight, sagged deeply and pulled Gerard down. He struggled to readjust himself, attempting to maintain an appearance of dignity in front of the brothel girl whom Lindsey was now speaking to in a hushed, eager voice, showing her more trust and friendliness than she had yet treated him to.

The girl had gone back behind the door and Lindsey came back to stand behind the couch. She rocked on her feet expectantly and didn’t sit down again. Then suddenly, the front hallway was full of movement.

One of the doors on the upper walkway opened, and a girl and a young man were out on the walkway. They had been headed toward the farthest door, the girl leading and the young man following shyly with his hat in his hand. But then the man was looking over the railing at Lindsey and calling out, first in a soft amazed voice, and then with more enthusiasm.

“Miss Ann,” the young man said, wide eyes on Lindsey’s face. “Miss Ann, is that you?”

At the same time, the doorway behind the curtain had opened and an older woman had walked into the front room.

She was tall and carried herself with a stick-straight dignity. She wore a long, high-buttoned dress and a lace shawl. The dress was dull and the lace was worn, but it still managed to make the woman look regal. Gerard had never seen the madam of a brothel before, but he felt certain he was looking at one right now.

“Miss Ann,” the boy called plaintively, leaning over the railing. “What are you doing here? They told me you’d gone.”

The older woman stepped out into full view of the couple on the upper walkway. She seemed to grow several inches taller as she addressed the girl. “Carrie,” she said sternly. “Please see to him.” She moved her head toward the furthest doorway.

The girl on the walkway turned to the man and smiled at him warmly and spoke to him in a low, pleasant voice. He looked at her, glanced back to Lindsey, and then was fully absorbed in whatever the girl was saying to him. The girl, Carrie, took on a hint of the older woman’s height as she grasped him firmly by the arm and steered him toward the end of the hallway. They disappeared behind the door.

When she was satisfied they’d gone, the older woman turned back to Lindsey, and her face lot all its look of command.

“Ann,” she said softly.

Lindsey hurried to her and they embraced for a long, long moment. Gerard watched, finding the good sense to stay quiet. When they pulled apart, Lindsey kept a tight hold on the woman’s hand.

“Well,” the woman said, looking Lindsey over from head to toe. She smiled at what she saw and patted Lindsey’s hand. “Well,” she said again, nodding, and then gave a small wave toward the upper walkway from which the man and woman had disappeared. “Jimmy’s still pining for you, as you can see,” she said.

Lindsey nodded and sniffed, giving a little laugh. Although Gerard could see the tears standing in her eyes in the lamplight, it was the first time he had seen anything so close to a smile on her face.

“And who’s this?” The older woman turned to Gerard, who struggled to his feet, breaking free from the lumpy hallway couch.

Lindsey’s voice was audibly damp. “His name is Gerard,” she said to the woman. “He lost his friend. It’s a long story.”

“Gerard,” Lindsey said, when she had gained a little better control over her voice. “This is Miss Sadie Newsome.”

“Ma’am,” Gerard said, ducking his head in a small bow with all the formality he could muster. His mind swam with all the new information he had learned about Lindsey. 

“I’m very pleased to meet you,” he said.

Miss Newsome returned a small curtsy that still managed to be rather imperial. Her face had become a still and depthless pool as she looked at Gerard, and Gerard recognized the impenetrable calm that was on Lindsey’s face so often. He held his hat in his hands, trying not to crush up the brim by worrying it so, but there wasn’t much else he could think to do with his hands.

 

#### Lindsey Tells The Story of the Preacher Man

In Miss Newsome’s sitting room, Gerard surreptitiously listened to Lindsey and the madam talk. Lindsey had murmured a few words to the girl from the hallway and she disappeared briefly, appearing again with a bottle of spirits and a glass. Lindsey settled Gerard at a small table in the corner with the bottle and glass in front of him, as though she expected the bottle to entertain him. As though he were a child that needed minding. He shifted sullenly in the chair and fiddled with the bottle and glass, watching the two women out of the corner of his eye.

Lindsey sat on an couch that was much the elder of the one in the hallway, whose worst bare patches were draped with lace tatting. She cut an incongruous picture, still in kerchief and vest and men’s pants, her heavy boots off now and sitting by the door. She curled up as she talked to Miss Newsome, pulling her thin bare feet under her. The madam, Gerard noticed with a tinge of annoyance, was treating Lindsey as though this all was perfectly natural. He didn’t normally have two thoughts about Lindsey’s clothes and hat, but here, sitting ignored in the corner, he began to feel irritated.

He fiddled with the glass a bit more and realized he was struggling with the childish impulse to make some kind of fuss, to spill the glass on accident or saying something rough, something that would make her look up and pay attention to him. When the glass made an especially loud clink, Lindsey broke off what she was saying and looked over at him.

“Can’t you act grown?” she said, glaring at him in amazement. Chagrined, Gerard looked down at the table.

As he kept his hands still and listened, focusing alternately on their conversation and his jealous, irritated mood, Gerard realized that Lindsey was recounting the story of their travels to Miss Newsome. But she included more story in the telling than she ever had told to Gerard. He listened more closely.

“So you found him,” Miss Newsome was saying. “And it’s him? Who you thought he was?”

“Oh, yes,” Lindsey said with some distaste. “I recognized him right away.” She shook her head bitterly. “How could I not? He’s not that different from what I remember.”

“Well.” Miss Newsome looked irritated, as though troubled by a faint but displeasing smell. “Hard to believe such a horse’s ass could cause so much trouble. How did he even come to be doing … all this?”

“I think I have a picture of how it happened.” Lindsey sighed and set her hands firmly in her lap, preparing to tell more. “That’s what I been doing since I left—going the places I thought he might of been, asking questions, reading whatever records they had when I could. Which wasn’t a lot. Near as I can tell, the train he was on didn’t even make it out as far as Fort Aubry. Somewhere in western Kansas, it just got busted up and disappeared. Indians, or wild animals, or even if they all got sick with something, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem possible that it was only ten years ago and everything here was still so wild as all that. Everywhere I been, there are towns and people. Even the forts, they all got stores and post offices. But it wasn’t like that then.”

“That’s true enough,” Miss Newsome said.

Gerard realized Lindsey was talking about a wagon train. He blinked. When he had come west, it had been by rail. Even then, the rails were new, and it wasn’t cheap. He had saved for months. Wagon was a harder way to travel. It was how people came when they planned to leave everything else behind them. Gerard glanced at Miss Newsome and wondered how long she had been here, in Holly, how she had come out. He turned the glass in his hands, finding he was much more interested in what the women were saying than in the spirits. Lindsey went on.

“He was set to take the Santa Fe trail. My mama knew that at least, from before. We only ever got one letter, from Fort Osage on the Missouri River, and that was all. We thought he died.” She looked at Miss Newsome, who was nodding. “Well, you know that.” She shrugged. “The whole time we were here, we thought he was dead.”

“I don’t know why we came out if she thought he was dead,” Lindsey said, quietly, musingly, and Gerard knew she was talking about her mother.  “Maybe she thought there’d be something out her for us. Maybe she thought she’d learn what happened.”

“When I was traveling and asking around, it took me a while to understand the things I was hearing. Course, I thought I was looking for record of a dead man. I wanted to find someplace where it said he died. I thought I’d find some comfort in that. When I did find it, though—by then, I had reason to believe it wasn’t quite true. There was a little notice in a newspaper that a wagon train was busted up just past the Cimarron crossing at the Arkansas River. Not too far from Dodge City.”

Gerard’s ear caught the name of where they’d just been. He didn’t remember the Arkansas River, though. They must have crossed it in the night when he was unconscious. The thought gave him a chill.

Lindsey continued. “In that notice I found, it said Hal Lindsey the homesteader died, and it listed the other members of the train who died too. One of them was a preaching man, a minister.” She looked at Miss Newsome pointedly.

“By then, I had heard about this new minister, what a powerful preacher he was. Course there wasn’t no record of where he came from, no one knew if he was with the Methodists or the Baptists or the Episcopalians or who all. He was just out here on the circuits, doing God’s work on the frontier.” She said it in a disgusted way. “Good as he was, though, there always seemed to at least one person who felt powerfully uneasy after he left. Those were the people I talked to. It made me start to have suspicions.”

“You see, I heard people describe how that minister preached, what it felt like to hear him preach on God’s wrath. It was just too familiar. I remembered how things were when I was little, back east, when we all still lived together. When he shouted at my mama, it made the whole house feel dark, like there was blue clouds all around, stifling everything. It was like a storm had come inside from the outdoors.” She frowned at the memory. “He said the most terrible blaming things.”

“And so,” Lindsey said, raising her voice just a bit, “When you said something happened, but you couldn’t remember, I recognized that. When you said it, I knew.” Gerard realized she was addressing him, even as he stared at the half-full glass of whiskey in his hands.

He looked up and met her eyes, holding them a moment before she looked away. She looked scared, uncertain—as though the full story had become more real for her in the telling, putting it all together out of the disparate pieces of their travels and her own. He imagined he looked just as fearful, coming to understand the fuller picture of this man they were pursuing. But underneath the fear, he felt warmed, just a little, realizing she understood he was listening all along. It wasn’t an accident that she’d dumped him down at the little table, in easy hearing distance of their entire conversation. Perhaps it was easier this way than for her to tell it to him straight on—maybe it was the best she could do.

They sat in silence for a bit.

“How can he do it?” Gerard asked finally. He had meant to say something more decisive, something showing his maturity to Lindsey and Miss Newsome, proving that he wasn’t some big, dumb child that Lindsey was dragging along with her, even if he felt sometimes that he was. But when he opened his mouth, he found he was still mostly scared and confused. The preacher man, even just talking about him how they were, made him uncertain and afraid.

“It’s his gift, I guess,” Lindsey said, shaking her head bitterly. “Not the preaching, necessarily, just his voice. I don’t know that he has any special belief about God or judgment or all those things he talks about. I just think it suits his purpose to make people feel small and ashamed.”

“Which it does.” Lindsey looked over at Gerard again. “You saw how those people joined right in at the prayer meeting. When someone tells them they’re bad, people are awful quick to hear it.”

Her voice softened a little. “He would say things like that to us, me and my mother and my little sister. I used to believe the things he told me. I used to think God would look down on me and be so angry at everything I did and thought. I felt so ashamed. I used to pray to be saved, just so I could feel better for a little. It never worked. I never felt better, not ever.”

“Dear girl,” Sadie said, and put her hand out to touch Lindsey’s face. “People like you and me got no use for sin and forgiveness. I don’t know if most people do. I hope you at least learned that by now.”

Lindsey let her face rest against the woman’s hand, but didn’t look up to meet Sadie’s eyes. Then she pulled away, back into herself, becoming small.

“He didn’t even recognize me,” she said. “Not at first. I had to tell him who I was.” Her voice was shaky, full of unshed tears. Gerard found himself powerfully concerned that she sounded so sad. He was beginning to realize, with some alarm, how carefully he seemed to be treating Lindsey in his feelings, how his concern for her well-being was growing.

Sadie looked at her with sympathy. “He’s a bad man,” she said. “You got to understand that by now. I know that, and I ain’t never met him.”

“I do,” Lindsey said, sighing, wrapping her arms around herself. “I know it now.”

There was more silence. Sadie adjusted the lamp. It was very dark outside.

“Well, dear girl, what now?” she asked. “Now that you know it, what’re you gonna do?”

Lindsey considered for another long moment and then said resolutely, “Well, I ain’t gonna let him go. I ain’t gonna let him just keep on like this, with no accounting for what he’s done.”

“And those people!” She said it sharply, as though the memory pained her. “All those people at the meeting who listened to him—at that meeting and every meeting. And those men he’s got with him. It ain’t right.” 

“And his friend.” She nodded toward Gerard. “That man took his friend away, and he’s got him now, too.”

Sadie looked at Gerard and nodded slowly, eying him appraisingly. She looked back to Lindsey. “So, this one is helping you?”

Lindsey nodded, and Gerard was filled again with the desire to appear strong, capable, faithful, so Miss Newsome would know he could be trusted with Lindsey, this strange, serious young woman that she clearly cared so fiercely about. 

“Well, you think on it,” Sadie said to her. “You think on what you’re gonna do.”

 

Gerard and Lindsey walked their horses back to a stable where they could stay the night.

Lindsey was in good spirits after talking to Miss Newsome. She had an easy swing to her step and Gerard swore she smiled in the dark. He wished he could catch a glimpse of her face.

He and Mariah followed Lindsey and the bay filly down a path that swung in a curve, bringing it near to three trees standing together in a loose cluster. They were green and brushy, full figured columns with branches that spread out all the way to the ground. In the moonlight and the light from the night sky, Gerard thought they must be some of the pines or spruces he’d started to see in the distance as they approached Holly, as the land began its rise toward the mighty Rocky Mountains. But as they approached, he made out that the trees were covered all over in ruffled leaves, not needles. They stood in loose cluster, and there was something agreeable about their little group, like three women in full skirts that had stopped by the side of the lane to chat.

As Lindsey passed them, she put out her hand and brushed it through the foliage of the tree closest to the path.

Curiously, Gerard did the same when he approached it. Immediately, with a small yelp he did his best to stifle, he pulled his hand back. The stickery leaves poked at him like a pincushion’s worth of needles. They scraped at the sleeve of his jacket as he shook his hand free, as though they were trying to keep their grasp on him. Standing closer now in the low light, he could see that the ruffles he had perceived were sharp, needled points around the edges of the leaves.

“Don’t mess with them too much,” Lindsey called back to him. “They’re sharp.” Her voice had a quiet, satisfied tone to it as though the smile he had imagined was still on her face, as though she was pleased at how the tree had snatched at him. She added, “Holly berries are poison, did you know that?” She slowed in the path and Gerard was standing beside her.  Their horses stood with them, unhurriedly.

It seemed to make her happy, how unfriendly the trees were. He wondered if it was because she could relate to it. She was a strange one, Gerard thought. But he enjoyed the open sound of her voice, enjoyed that she was volunteering to talk to him.

“I been watching those trees grow up since I was twelve,” she said. “They only used to be about this high.” She held out her hand at her waist. “Someone thought it’d be fitting for us to have some holly trees here, because of the name, you know? There’s two boys and one girl.”

Gerard puzzled in the dark for a bit. “I suppose I heard of that,” he said finally. “About how holly trees are like that. It’s just awful odd to think about a plant being a boy or a girl.” He looked at the trees. They all looked the same. “Which one’s the girl?”

“That one,” Lindsey pointed to the tree furthest from the path. “But they didn’t know that when they planted them. They were just seedlings, and you can’t tell when they’re small. So they planted three, to give them the best chance that there’d be a pair. If there was just one by itself, it could never have berries, no matter what it was.

“Although they’re not a pair,” she mused. “They’re three, together. I always liked that,” she said, shifting the reins in her hands. “With their shiny leaves, pretty even though they’re so sharp. And I liked that there are three, that they’re never alone. When I was younger, these three together always reminded me of my mother, and me, and my sister.”

“Your mother and your sister?” Gerard asked, trying to keep his tone calm, wanting to coax her to tell him more. “Are we going to see them?”

“No,” Lindsey said, shaking her head slowly. “We all used to live here together, in Holly, but not now. They ain’t here no more.”

It was a small phrase, but it rang in a such a desolate way in the night.

Gerard reached and put his hand on her shoulder, wanting to comfort her, wanting to hear more of the happiness that the fierce holly trees seemed to give her, not her voice full of loneliness. For a moment, Gerard believed he might reach out to her and pull her tenderly against his chest, nothing more than that. He wanted her to relax warm against him and for them to stand there together for a while, with the horses breathing companionably beside them and the sky arched over them, filled with stars.

Then Mariah shifted her weight and gave an especially enthusiastic whuffling sigh and the moment was over. Gerard looked away, busying himself unnecessarily with straightening Mariah’s reins, and let Lindsey start toward the stable again. They continued down the path, leaving the holly trees standing in their companionable group behind them.

 

The next morning, Gerard found Lindsey and Miss Newsome together in the sitting room, eating breakfast and drinking coffee.

“I told her we’re going to go south,” Lindsey said as soon as he walked in the room. “You want that, right? To go south after him and after your friend.”

Gerard nodded. He sat with them and ate what Miss Newsome offered him. They talked further and Gerard dutifully repeated the words Frank had said to him: Oklahoma, Cimarron County, Black Mesa.

Miss Newsome listened consideringly. When the girl from the front hallway came in, bringing more coffee and bread, Miss Newsome asked her to fetch several of the girls.

Gerard sat nervously with Lindsey and Miss Newsome at the little table while girls came and went, coming in in ones or twos to sit on the couch and talk with them, to answer Miss Newsome’s questions. It was morning, and the women all looked plain and tired, wearing day clothes and without their hair done. They sat easily on the couch in front of Lindsey and Miss Newsome and talked freely. Gerard had been around whores, of course, but only in one particular capacity before now. These women just seemed like ladies—or not even like _ladies_ , he thought, just like people. It was odd that he had never considered it that way before.

The women shared recollections and bits of conversation they’d had or heard repeated. Many of the men they were visited by were traveling men who lived elsewhere, men eager to chatter and pontificate about their worldly wisdom and adventures on the road. Piecing together the parts that everyone heard and inferred seemed to create a rough patchwork of what they could expect further south: Yes, Cimarron County was in the most western area of Oklahoma, nearly directly south from here. The one marking spot between here and there was Two Buttes, a double topped mountain that stood by itself in southeast Colorado. As for the county in Oklahoma wasn’t much there, and as for the land itself, no one cared to lay claim to it. It was only by default that it was coming to be considered to be part of Oklahoma at all. Men who said they were from Oklahoma were always from further east, with little regard for the westernmost parts, and men who traveled north from Mexico or the Texas panhandle spoke of that stretch as a no man’s land. There was a post office, only that, in Kenton, near there, they said, and all through that area were hills and mesas, the flat-topped mountains. There was a creek that ran on the northernmost edge of those mountains, and it led the way in. It was where the less-traveled southern loop of Santa Fe trail went—the Cimarron Cutoff—where Hal Lindsey’s wagon train might have passed if it had made it far enough. There were rumors of bands of robbers who lived in those desolate hills—men didn’t like to travel through the hills unless they had to—and Black Mesa was the tallest one.

As the girls came and went and the conversations progressed, Gerard realized how much information they were gathering from the women of the Holly Blossom. As the last girl left the room and Lindsey followed her so they could talk together for a moment in the hallway, Gerard turned to Miss Newsome and asked, “Your girls, how do they know so much?”

Miss Newsome turned on him, considering him as though she had forgotten he was there and just now remembered. She seemed a little pleased at his question, in a startled way, as though he was a puppy or a child that had done something intelligent—a surprise, considering its unremarkable capacities.

“You may not know this, son,” she said, fixing him with a stern gaze, “But women hear a lot of things. Especially in a place like this. And it don’t go well for women if we let too much of what men say go by without paying attention.” She breathed a sigh and folded her hands on her lap, looking away. “Men are funny creatures,” she said, and the imperial edge was gone from her voice, as though she was speaking mostly to herself. “They never seem to believe it when women know things. It’s a surprise to them every time.” She said it in a perfunctory way, as though the strangeness of men’s ways had long ago ceased to interest her much.

She turned back to him and touched his hand where he had set it on the table. “Don’t worry, son. You may be young, but you’re clever enough. You’ll learn. I expect you can’t help but learn, if you’re going to travel with Miss Lindsey.”

When Lindsey came back in, Miss Newsome stood, and opened a wooden box from a shelf against the wall. From it, she took a pistol and a box of bullets. She turned the pistol in her hand and offered it to Lindsey.

Lindsey looked at it, a little surprised. “Don’t you need it?” she asked.

“Oh, less than you’d think,” Miss Newsome said. “The men of Holly have learned to be respectful. It took a little time, but they’re doing well. Of course, I’ll keep this right here.” She let the lid of the case fall shut and patted it.

“I have this,” Lindsey said, feeling in her pockets and pulling out the derringer.

Miss Newsome looked at the tiny gun. “My dear,” she said, “I think you’ve graduated to something that holds more than two bullets. You may find you want that, with what’s coming.” She put the pistol in Lindsey’s hands and took the derringer, laying it top of the wooden box.

“And a holster?” Miss Newsome asked. "Don’t suppose you got a holster for something like that?”

“No ma’am,” Lindsey said. She waited where she stood while Miss Newsome rummaged near the threadbare couch. She stood up with a leather belt with bullet loops and a pistol holster.

“It was Clyde’s,” she said, putting it into Lindsey’s hands. “My late husband,” she added, with a glance at Gerard, who had apparently earned the right to be included in the conversation.

She turned back to Lindsey. “I punched some extra holes in the belt. It should go round your waist just fine.”

Lindsey held the belt, looking at it. “Why?” she asked. “Why did you do that?” Her eyes were wet again.

“No reason,” Miss Newsome said. “I just thought you might be ready for something like this the next time I saw you.”

Lindsey put the belt on and pulled it tight around her waist. It fit at the last notch in the belt. There was a tall mirror on a stand in the corner of the room, and Lindsey stepped in front of it and peered at herself in the cloudy glass. Her face was expressionless.

“There you go, my dear.” Sadie kissed her cheek as Lindsey looked at herself in the mirror.

 

When they left Holly later that morning, Gerard realized he felt more warm and familiar toward Lindsey, after all that he had seen. After they had been on the road for an hour or so, he rode Mariah beside her, so he could look her in the face.

“Ann, huh?” he said with a little smile.

She gave him a warning look, but he kept the smile on his face, taking a chance at pushing her further.

“Lindsey?” he said and wrinkled his nose skeptically. “I knew that wasn’t your name. That’s a man’s name.”

“It’s my name more than anyone else’s, far as I’m concerned,” she said coldly.

Then she reconsidered and seemed to relax a little. She looked at him, her face softening, acknowledging that he was teasing her.  She almost smiled.

Then she looked up the road and her face was serious again. “I don’t like remembering when I was Ann is all,” she said. “It was a sad time. I didn’t like it much.” There was that lonesomeness again, what she had hinted at when they were talking by the holly trees. Gerard was certain that her mother and sister had called her Ann, and just as certain that now no one did, outside of the women at the Holly Blossom. He nodded to her without saying anything. 

They rode on, putting the town of Holly in back of them and heading south and west.

 

#### The Fight at Black Mesa

On the road south, the mornings were chilly. Sometimes thin gray clouds covered the whole huge expanse of the sky above them. The sun had tilted and its light hit them less harshly during the days. Nights were getting dark earlier, the sun slipping colorfully below the horizon when the heat of the day hadn’t yet broken. The season was changing.

But it hadn’t rained yet, and the land was yellow and dry. Buffalo grass crunched like straw under the horses’ hooves. Gerard hadn’t felt the sweeping emptiness of the plains before in quite the same way as he did now. During the drives, he had always been surrounded by men and wagons and work, always with the cattle bawling, spread out around them like an immense brown lake.

The emptiness of the land seeped into his bones. It made him quiet. Questions still needled at him, but as they rode, in silence as often as not, he found that he understood more than he realized. As his mind shuffled the facts over and over again, taking an accounting of what he knew and what he needed to know, he found that the first was more and the second less. In Abilene, everything in him had scrambled for answers and certainty, stirring up his own sense of blind panic until he could see nothing else.

But now, as the miles moved under their horses’ feet, he felt himself changing. As he reconciled himself to the road they were on, understood what lay at the end of it, things inside him became more settled. He was on this road because he believed Frank would be at the end of it. It was, he realized, the way Lindsey was—her silence and singleness of vision, everything in her pointed toward the road and toward the preacher man.

Another part of it all was that he was beginning to trust Lindsey. He would watch her back when she rode ahead of him, the silhouette her figure cut against the sky—a lady, but fierce and solid and strong. It was a new idea to him to think of her like that, and he let it sink into his mind. Perhaps it was true what Miss Newsome had implied about him, that he hadn’t properly paid attention to any ladies or what they were doing until right at that moment.

When he sang, the songs that found their way to his lips were sad ones. When he whistled, he heard how it pierced the emptiness that hung over the flatlands, how the wind, uncaring, picked it up and carried it away. He whistled anyway, let the tune unroll in the great, wide space around them and trail away from him as invisibly as a spool of thread.

The next afternoon, they saw Two Buttes growing on the horizon. It was strange to see it rising up to stand lonesomely in the flat land. But it was unmistakable—a single mountain with two tops standing side by side. They put it on their left hand and kept it there as they turned more directly south. Their way started to be spotted with yucca plants, which Gerard had never seen before, bushes with tall stalks of white flowers and straight green leaves as long and sharp as swords.

As Two Buttes fell beside them and then receded, Gerard could see the shadow of hills and scrubland on the southern horizon. Somewhere there would be the creek, and following the creek would take them into the rocky flat-topped hills of Cimarron County, the very edge of the Oklahoma territory. If it even was Oklahoma at that point—maybe it was just nothing. No Man’s Land, the way the ladies had described it said.  Within the day, they came to the creek, a low, muddy, unassuming thing, surrounded by scrub brush, a few rocks, and the suggestion of hills. But at least it was water. They filled their canteens and let the horses drink.

“Follow the creek into the hills is our best bet, I think,” Lindsey said, scanning the horizon where the low hills crowded together. “Then we’ll see what we can see.”

After an hour or two, Gerard could see a flat-topped mesa coming into prominence on in his view to the west, larger than the other hills.

“Is that it?” he asked Lindsey. “They said it was the tallest thing.” She followed to where he pointed with her eyes, frowning skeptically.

“Well,” she said finally. “We don’t have anywhere else to go, do we?”

They continued to make their slow way along the creek, and Gerard kept his eyes on the mesa.

“You think that might be smoke?” he asked Lindsey. She looked again. They both stared for a long time.

“I believe it is,” Lindsey said.

“Do you think they can see us coming?” Gerard asked.

“If they’re on top of that thing, they probably have all the view they want.” Lindsey scowled. “Depends on whether anyone has the sense to look, or thinks there’s anything to be looking for.”

The creek was beginning to sweep in a wide bow to the east, and they left it, pointing the horses’ heads toward the gray smudge. It soon disappeared, as though the fire had been put out. When they reached the foot of the mesa, the sun was high in the afternoon sky. They pulled themselves and their horses into the largest patch of scrub they could find, putting it between themselves and the mesa’s flat top, upon which they could make out no distinguishing marks.

“If they ain’t seen us by now, it’s a miracle,” Lindsey said, shaking her head. She took off her hat and wiped her forehead on her sleeve.

“They only seen us if they been looking, right? If they even have a reason to be looking. If that’s even them.” Gerard said, squinting through the brush leaves at the crown ridge of the mesa. There was no way to know. “How long you think it’d take us to get up there? Couple hours?”

Lindsey nodded. “I don’t think we can take the horses all the way up, not from this side, at least. Too steep. Anyway,” she said, “A little steepness on the way down might not be a bad thing to put in between us and whoever happens to be following.”

Gerard felt the nerves start in his stomach, felt the feeling clutching at the bottoms of his lungs, making it hard to draw a full breath. 

“But,” Lindsey continued, “That means one of us has to wait with the horses, and the other one has to go up on foot. Alone.”

Gerard nodded slowly. They pondered for a bit in silence.

“You should go up—if you will,” Lindsey declared after a time. “I’ll cover you. I’ve got more shots, and I’d have better chance to hit anything sitting still, watching, waiting for it. Better than either of us would have, trying to shoot backwards over our shoulders and sliding down the side of a mountain at the same time.”

“Anyway,” she glanced at the top of the mesa again. “We don’t even know what’s up there. Maybe you go up and nothing’s there. Maybe you go up and find it’s safe enough and we can both come. You give one of your whistles and I know to come along. Or maybe,” she paused ominously before going on. “Maybe you go up, you steal your friend away, and you both come down as fast as you can. I cover you while you do that, then we all get out of here, post haste.”

“And what about you?” Gerard asked. “Am I supposed to believe you’ll be content to sit here in the underbrush? You don’t want to go in after him?”

“I told you, I think we can both go up about halfway, maybe more. I’ll be nearby. But no, I think it’s stupid to try to have a full blown gunfight when we don’t know who’s there and there’s only us two. It ain’t safe. I think getting your friend out is most important, and whatever I want or don’t want don’t matter as much as that. We can’t help Frank at all if we end up broken in pieces down the side of this mountain. Anyway, I’ll be closer than this, and if I see him and get a clear shot, it might happen that I take it.”

They looked up the side of the mountain for a bit more. 

“Will you do it?” Lindsey asked. 

Gerard looked up the rocky slope. He looked back at Lindsey and nodded.

“So, we’ll wait til dark, til the moon rises. This ain’t much of a plan we got, but if we can do it in the darkness, we might have half a chance.” She gave the mesa ridge a little nod. It was settled. 

 

They waited in the brush until the sky got dark, and then waited some more. The horses dozed in the shade and grew restive as darkness fell. With the mountainside at their back, the clear, white-spattered sky wheeled dizzily above them, stretching in every direction.

“Would you lookit there,” Lindsey murmured in the darkness.

Gerard followed her gesture the best he could toward the mesa ridge. He peered and peered into the shadows until he could make something out. He blinked at it for a moment. It appeared to be the tiny orange fleck of a cookfire, flickering in the distance.

“Whoever it is, I don’t think they don’t know we’re here,” she said. “No one would be damn fool enough to light a fire if they thought someone was right down here watching em.” She made a satisfied sound and Gerard thought he could see her smiling in the dark.

The moon was in its waning quarter, and it crept above the horizon several hours after dark had fallen, bathing the plain behind them with a low light, washing its weak glow up the side of the mesa. They mounted their horses and coaxed them carefully up the hillside, crossing back where the ridges in the land allowed them, avoiding rocky patches the best they could, mindful of the sound of the horses’ footfalls in the dark.

They walked carefully in the darkness for several miles, and then the land began to rise even more steeply. Mariah, with her long legs, navigated the brush and rocks fairly easily, and the bay filly picked her way gamely along behind. But when Mariah began to slow and choose her footing even more carefully, Gerard stopped and let Lindsey come up beside him.

There was a little dip in the land before them, so that Lindsey and the horses would stand on a slight ridge if they stopped there. Gerard would need to scramble across a wash of stones before he began the steeper part of his climb. They had a clear view of the edge of the mesa. Something was coming into view against the edge, among the outcroppings of rock, that might be the silhouette of a low building.

“How bout here?” he murmured quietly, indicating the little ridge. There were standing rocks near the edge where they could take a bit of cover.

“Yup,” Lindsey said. “It’s as good a place as any.”

He slid off Mariah’s back and pulled his rifle from the side scabbard of his saddle. He slung it over his shoulder on the rough sling and adjusted it so he could walk without it banging about too much. He pulled the reins across Mariah’s neck to reach them over to Lindsey, and she looped them loosely over her saddle horn. Mariah watched him as she sometimes did, not with curiosity but with an unnatural certainty, as though she understood what he was doing.

Gerard felt a hope go through him, a wordless plea, as he looked up toward the ridged edge of the mesa. He patted Mariah’s warm neck and then held his empty hand out to Lindsey. She grabbed his hand and squeezed it in the dark.

“All right, now,” she said, her voice low but urgent. “You just be careful.”

 

Gerard began his climb, easing his way as carefully as possible through the wash of loose rocks and then beginning the scramble up the side of the mesa, wincing whenever his footing slid and the rocks scraped against each other, complaining noisily in the dark.

He climbed hard for half a mile or more, picking his way across the rocks, scrambling up the dirt slopes so steep there were places where he could lean and almost climb on all fours. He pulled his rifle around to rest against his back, mostly out of the way of his hands and feet as he climbed.

The top of the mesa kept bobbing into view when he was on gentler slopes and not scrambling straight up. It appeared to be dotted here and there with more scrub brush and some unusual piles of rock, but Gerard became more and more certain that he saw the outline of a building. But then the ground grew so steep that he couldn’t see anything of the mesa top anymore, and soon he was standing face to face with a short rock wall. He looked back down behind him, across the jagged mountainside, trying to make out Lindsey and the horses. After some time of watching the shadows, he felt certain he could see her in the distance.

The lip of the mesa was a vertical rock face that, as he stood facing it with his heels threatening to slip back down the slope behind him, was as tall as his chin. After testing a few handholds, he realized he couldn’t hope to pull himself up onto it, not without surer footing under his feet. Instead, he crept along the face until he found a place where the ledge was shallower and the ground flatter at its bottom. He set his hands and pulled himself up, hopping, grabbing, and throwing his leg to gain purchase near the top to hoist the rest of his body up, not far from how he’d mount a horse bareback. He gained the top easily enough and lay on his belly in the dark. He was breathless, partly from exertion but mostly from the nerves of creeping about in the dark, afraid at every turn that he’d hear the sounds of men’s footsteps, or the cocking of a gun, anything more than his own breath and footfalls in the dark. His ears rang from listening so fiercely and still he strained to hear more.

From his prone position, he looked across the mesa’s flat top, back to where the ledge was taller. First thing his eye caught was a thin wisp of white smoke rising high into the night sky, making the stars and moonlight behind it flicker. He traced it down to the silhouette of a low building, the thing he had seen on the horizon and thought he was imagining. But now that he was looking at it, it appeared to be somewhat dilapidated house or outbuilding, something that had clearly housed people once and had then been allowed to fall into disrepair. He squinted at rocks and brush at the edge of the clearing around it and what appeared to be old firewood in knocked down piles.

The house had a low fire inside, or candles, or another light source of some kind—there were dim shadows that moved against the closed shutters. Gerard stood at the edge of the clearing, sweaty hands around his rifle, listening to the sounds inside the house. There were people inside, certainly. He might wait here all night, he thought. But there was nothing to do to provoke a confrontation that wasn’t incredibly foolish. He had only two shots on the rifle, and there were surely more men than that inside. He crept carefully closer.

Inside the house, sounds continued, a rhythm of rustlings and periodic words and humorless chuckles that sounded like a game of cards or dice.

He wracked his brain for what to do, feeling sweat coming out on his forehead. Finally, hands shaking, he eased the rifle down, letting its weight drop against the sling, and cupped his hands to whistle into them, a soft melodic sound, as close as he could come to an owl call.

He waited, hearing the bugs and crickets echoing around him in the night air. Nothing in the cabin seemed to change. He tried the owl call again, repeating the low whistling sound softly. Even as he struggled to keep the whistle quiet, he could feel himself reaching toward Frank with everything in him, willing him to hear and to understand, as though he could coax him outside with the power of his mind.

He waited again, and then there was the blessed sound of a door creaking on the opposite side of the cabin and someone coming out. For a moment, a golden shadow jumped across the clearing, touching the brush and rocks that seemed to be at the mesa’s opposite edge as the door opened and shut. Gerard held his breath and tightened his grip on his rifle. The footsteps on the other side of the house walked aimlessly, seeming to recede. Then there was the spattering sound of someone pissing over the edge onto the rocks below. Gerard held himself completely still, his heart pounding in his ears. The steps continued around the house and from behind the corner of the building appear a silhouette that Gerard recognized with every ounce of his being.

“Frank,” Gerard whispered in the dark as he came close enough. “Frank it’s me.”

Gerard didn’t know what to expect—would Frank recognize him? Would he be himself? Would finding Gerard there so suddenly startle him into making noise that would call the goons outside? In a second, Frank had caught him by the hand and then they were holding each other, tight and breathless. Frank pulled away to look Gerard in the face, his grin bright and improbable even in the dark.

Inside the house, there were sounds of more movement. Someone raised his voice. “Where’s the little one? That Frank, where’s he at now?”

“Shit,” Frank murmured, turning back to the house, his hand still hard around Gerard’s arm as they stood together. “Here we go.”

“You, get up.” It was the preacher man’s voice from inside the house, deep and full of command. The other sounds in the building seemed to fall away from his voice. Gerard could picture a man, one of the goons, pinned by his voice and raised unwillingly to his feet. “Go get him, wherever he is,” the preacher man growled. “I’m tired of this running off.”

The door rattled and they could hear the footsteps of the ordered man as he rounded the corner of the building, walking quickly, with intention. Frank pushed Gerard back into the shadow of the standing rocks and stepped into the clearing to meet the man. In the shadows, Gerard raised his rifle to his shoulder.

“What you doing out here?” the man called roughly.

“Didn’t you hear that noise?” Frank asked, with a vague gesture toward the rocks behind him.

“I didn’t hear no noise,” the man snarled, advancing on him. “And I don’t think you did neither.” They were standing close together, Frank eclipsing Gerard view of the man.

“It was an owl,” Frank said. “Didn’t you hear it? I just come out to look, that’s all. Don’t need to—”

“Ain’t no damn owl out here, and you know it,” the man said. “Now, you’re wanted back inside.” The man lunged at him and Frank stepped nimbly out of his way, out of the line of sight between Gerard and the man.

“Look,” Frank hissed defiantly, jabbing his hand toward the sky. “There it is.” 

A dark shape was suddenly over them, its impossibly wide wingspan blocking the stars. It was eerily silent, seeming to hang above them for far too long, and the Frank and the man both stood transfixed, staring up at it. The man’s hands were down, his head up, his chest perfectly exposed. Gerard ignored the owl-shape, steadied his rifle, and fired.

The shot echoed in the night air and Gerard’s ears rang. The owl-shape was gone instantly. The man took a staggering step backwards and then sank to his knees. The shot had been true. Gerard could see a dark stain spreading on the man’s chest and belly. His mouth worked, but he didn’t make a sound in the dark. Gerard felt a coldness in his chest and the moment stretched unnaturally long. That man would die, he thought. He was dying now.

Inside the hut, there was a ruckus, scraping and shouting and banging as a dozen men jumped to their feet and scrambled over each other for their guns. 

Gerard grabbed Frank’s arm and they ran for the mesa’s edge. “We gotta jump,” Gerard called as Frank followed him. Behind them, they heard the sounds of the door bursting open, more shouting and expletives as men tumbled out into the night.

They reached the mesa’s edge quickly. Gerard jumped, seeing the valley spread out below of them. He grabbed at his rifle to pull the muzzle up, to keep it from hitting when he landed.  The ground fell away and then rose beneath him again them in the dark and he was tumbling downward in gravel and rocks, scraping hands and knees. He heard Frank scrabbling beside him. Then he heard a gunshot from behind them, saw rocks and dust jump in front of him as the shot landed.

Gerard shouted and cut back sideways, veering sharply away from where the shot had landed, trying to lead himself and Frank in the direction he believed Lindsey and the horses to be. He was disoriented in the dark, sliding in the black rock.

Then a shot rang out from ahead of them and Gerard saw the rock and the little ridge, saw Lindsey, her arm steady as she aimed at the men above them on the hill. The men shouted and scrambled as they realized someone else was taking shots in the night.

Lindsey fired again and, behind them, a hundred yards up the slope, a man was knocked back, his body sliding on the rocks.

Gerard ran and slipped and ran harder, taking the slope in the longest leaps he could manage, keeping his eye on Frank, who matched him easily. As they got near the ridge, Gerard could see the horses’ eyes wide and white-rimmed in the gunfire. He mounted Mariah quickly and pulled Frank up in front of him. He squeezed her and tightened the reins, hoping to steady her and keep her from bolting.

“Stop. All of you.” They heard his voice, and it was loud, louder than anything could naturally be, impossibly clear and close over the sounds of sliding rock and the echoing gunshots.

The preacher man stood in the moonlight, his dark-clad figure looking down over the ledge they had tumbled over moments before. He didn’t seem to have a gun, but he held a lantern aloft in his hand. Stupidly, Gerard stared at the man and the light, and the world around him grew darker as the light blinded him, stealing away all the night vision he had had. Frank looked, too. Gerard could feel him turn. The men on the hillside seemed to stop as well, obedient to his voice.

“Frank,” the man said, and his voice was terrible. “I didn’t say you could go.” He put his other hand out, like he would reach across the distance to them, and then he jerked it back, as though he had snatched something from the air.

Gerard sensed it in Frank’s body. They were pressed together in the saddle built for one person, and suddenly Frank was turning, trying to slide out. Gerard grabbed him roughly around the waist, feeling them both start to slip as Mariah shifted and balked under them, confused.

“You get hold of him,” Lindsey shouted, turning her horse around on the narrow ground, and Gerard redoubled his efforts to hang on to Frank, to keep both of them on Mariah’s back so she could bear them away. He held on to Frank thoughtlessly, blindly, his eyes filled with spots from the lantern’s brilliant light. 

“Girl.” The man’s voice rang across the shallow ravine. Everything was still, hanging on his words. Even Frank seemed to stop for a moment. “Truly, I never planned to run across you again,” he said. “But you done this.” He said it darkly, and his accusation stood in the air, taking in the slope and the rocks, the fallen man, Frank struggling in Gerard’s arms—with his words, he blamed her for all of it. “I let you go last time,” he called. “You shoulda gone. But instead you came out here. Now the rest will be your fault.”

Lindsey cursed under her breath and turned in the saddle, firing a shot back toward the man. Gerard saw her dimly as he turned away from the man, from the sound of his voice, from the bright inhuman light in his hand. She was a perfect image in that moment, her back tall and her arm straight as she sighted a shot toward the ridge, the red kerchief at her throat like a splash of blood. It was burned into Gerard’s eyes. She fired once more and then turned, taking in Gerard’s struggle with Frank in a glance. Quickly, she raised her arm arm swung wide with the butt of her pistol, connecting with Frank’s head. Then she leaned over her horse’s neck and urged the filly over the edge. Gerard kicked at Mariah’s sides, pointing her after the filly as best he could around Frank’s body, suddenly limp against him, trusting that Mariah would find her way down.

“Go on,” Gerard heard the preacher man call behind them, talking to his men. “Stop them.”

There were more shots around them in the darkness. The filly screamed and reared as a bullet grazed her. Lindsey was tumbling to the ground with a cry, and somehow Mariah was next to the filly, bearing across her with a shoulder, driving her in a tight turn instead of letting her bolt. Gerard grabbed blindly for the horse’s reins, feeling his hands connect with leather and pulling her back sharply.

“You okay, you okay.” In the blur of movement, Gerard was shouting for Lindsey, even as he saw her scrambling to remount the filly again. Gerard couldn’t see where the horse had been hit. 

“Yes, yes, go!” Lindsey cried, and both Mariah and the filly broke away and ran.

They were at the base of the hill now and, even as they could hear occasional shouts from the men behind them, the horses were running full out and putting more and more distance in between them. A cold wind blew, and Gerard realized that in the time it had taken them to rush down the mesa’s side, the sky had gone completely black. The moon was gone, and so were the stars. Gerard hitched his arm under Frank’s armpits, grabbing him across the chest, and turned back for a second.

In that instant, a stroke of lightning forked against the ground behind the mesa, illuminating it in a cold silver light. Gerard saw the landscape frozen in that moment, laid out before him like an oil painting: the preacher man still at the crest of the mesa, his face turned toward them. The lantern still in his hand. Five men scattered on the upper half of the slope, and further above them under the ridge, the shadowed form of the man that Lindsey had shot, on the ground, unmoving. And the man at the top, Gerard also knew with cold certainty. He couldn’t see him, but the man’s body was there, as dead as the man on the hillside.

Gerard jerked around, looking in front of them just as the land blinked into darkness again. Mariah was aimed for a gap between the hills around them, where the hillsides rose up, creating a hollow passage.

Following the lightning by only a second, the cracking, rending sound of the thunder split in the sky behind them. It seemed to roll on forever as the horses ran, echoing against the hillsides. Gerard could feel it vibrate at the very center of his being, making his ribs weak and unsteady. He tightened his arms around Frank, pulling him close against his chest. Then came the rain, the sky unleashing a hail of drops falling so hard they stung, bitterly cold. Gerard was drenched in an instant, and Frank moved fitfully in his arms as the cold drops struck him.

The horses galloped into the gap in the hills, driven hard by fear and sounds of thunder and gunfire. Mariah led as the hills channeled them in a narrow path, forcing them further south, and then spit them out into a band of wide flatland. They thundered across it, aiming for more hills that Gerard could see to the south. The rain continued to fall, cold and biting, but there was no more lightning. He didn’t dare look back again for signs of pursuit. Instead, he pressed himself and Frank forward over Mariah’s neck.

They crossed the patch of flatland and entered more hills, taller, as they continued south. The horses fell out of their gallop as they wove into the next hills, but the ground on the floor of whatever channel they were traveling along proved to be flat enough that they could still run. After an hour or so running at a slower pace, Gerard could see that the filly flagged behind him and Lindsey herself looked stiff and crouched in the saddle. In front of him, Frank tossed his head and seemed to mutter something. From time to time, Frank would jerk his arms and try to pull away from Gerard’s grip and Gerard would readjust his hold. Frank hadn’t spoken. 

Mariah slowed gratefully when he touched her reins. Even she seemed to be wearying of the pace, especially carrying two riders. Gerard himself was beginning to find it distinctly uncomfortable. Frank was short, but not that small, and the saddle wasn’t built for this. Gerard let Mariah lead them out of the flat channel they had been following and under a rock overhang. The rocks were slick and dripping, but they had left the worst of the rain behind them.

Lindsey slid from the saddle, hitting the ground stiffly and inelegantly with a visible wince. Immediately, she came to help him ease Frank awkwardly down from Mariah’s back. Lindsey supported him as he half-stood and half-leaned against her.

“Frank.” She tried to look into his face as Gerard dismounted. The she was crying, “Whoa, whoa,” in a sharp voice and struggling against him. Gerard caught Frank and held him against his chest, then eased him to kneeling on the ground. Mariah stepped carefully away from all of them with an annoyed glance in Gerard’s direction.

“He hit me,” Lindsey said, sounding surprised but only a little accusing. She was fingering her jaw and lower lip. She gave a huff of annoyance, but spoke more calmly. “Not bad, just unlucky.” She touched her mouth again and turned to spit on the ground. She pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead for a moment.

“Frank, Christ.” Gerard said. His eyes were shut again and Gerard propped him somewhat upright against the wall of the rock shelf they huddled under. Behind him, Lindsey fumbled with her supplies and eventually lit the stub of a candle from her knapsack. Shadows jumped and loomed on the rock wall around them.

Gerard touched Frank’s face in several places, and Frank hardly turned from his hand. Gerard had the sudden cold sense that the words they had been saying to him this whole time had gone completely unheard, arrows that flew and fell uselessly, far from their unaware mark. Gerard felt his neck and in his hair, searching for marks or bumps. He felt a knot above Frank’s ear, probably where Lindsey had struck him. It was small, only a little tender, but feeling it made all the events of the night come rushing back to him. Even as he tried to handle Frank gently, Gerard found that his hands were shaking.

“What did you do to him?” he said to Lindsey. He could hear his voice waver.

“Christ, don’t blame me, you fool,” Lindsey snapped. “It ain’t what I did. I didn’t hit him that hard.” She moved stiffly away from them, walking to the edge of the rock overhang before rounding back on him, raising her voice. “It was _him_. It was like after the prayer meeting—this is what you were like. You wouldn’t wake up. Sometimes your eyes would be open, but you weren’t awake. Not really.”

She stood away from him and then, seeming to change her mind, she stalked back over to where Gerard knelt by Frank’s side.

“Move away,” she said and Gerard moved back, uncertain what she intended. Momentarily, he didn’t trust her.

Lindsey knelt in front of Frank, taking a second to ease herself to the ground, and put her hand on Frank’s face, much the same way Gerard had. Her touch was firm and she kept her eyes closely on him.

“Frank,” she said, first quietly, and then with increasing intensity. “Frank, you gotta listen to me.”

Frank blinked and his eyes fluttered open. For a moment, they were glassy, and he didn’t look at anything.

“Do you hear me?” she said. “You look at me now, and you listen.”

Frank’s mouth moved a little, but no sound came out. His eyebrows creased, but his eyes seemed to clear. He was looking at Lindsey.

“You sleep if you need to, but you gotta stop fighting like this,” she said, fixing his eyes with hers. “You’re safe now. You’re away from him. Gerard’s helping you. We’re both helping you. You just—” She exhaled wearily. “You gotta stop fighting us.”

For a moment more, Lindsey held Frank’s gaze. Then his eyes rolled and his head went slack, sagging gently forward against his chest. She smoothed his hair and collar, touching his jaw and neck. There were marks there, Gerard could see under her hands. He had taken them to be shadows at first, but he could see now that they had more definite shape than that. He frowned. They were old bruises.

Lindsey stood up slowly, turning to Gerard. Her eyes were dark and aggrieved.

“You should know by now, I don’t hurt people who don’t deserve it. Not even when I can.” She moved past him, pushing him away with her shoulder, and went to tend to her horse.

 

Gerard sat with Frank, listening to him breathe. It sounded easier, somehow, less labored than it had when they were in the saddle. He didn’t seem to be thrashing about as often. Gerard tried to rouse him enough to give him some water, but he wouldn’t swallow, and it ran from his mouth into his collar. Gerard put the flask away.

He watched balefully as Lindsey examined the filly. First, he automatically thought to stand and help her, but then he decided to stay by Frank, leaning against the wall of the overhang. He felt a bit like he was keeping watch over Frank against Lindsey. Her words were the arrows that had flown true to the mark, he could see, but it didn’t give him much cause for comfort, seeing her command Frank the same way the preacher man had, even if her words were designed to release instead of bind him. He thought uncomfortably of how much they looked alike, Lindsey and the man who they’d left standing on the ridge of Black Mesa. Frank was back beside him and the first thing happening was Lindsey saying these weighty, unnatural words to him. Gerard scowled. He didn’t like it.

The filly had a dark gash on her rump where she had been grazed by a bullet, but it was no longer bleeding and been washed clean by the rain. The horse balked and tossed her head when Lindsey laid her hands near it, but when she stood, it was without much difficulty. Gerard took this in, considering how much more ground they could cover that night. He roused himself and came to the edge of the rock overhang. In the east, just a suggestion of gray was starting to gather at the horizon.

Standing nearer to her, he realized he could hear her breathing, rough and shaky. He glanced at her. She had her arms pulled close around herself. She raised her hands to her mouth and blew into them. “You see any horses when you were up on that mesa?”

Gerard shook his head. “I didn’t, but there’s no way they could be out here with no horses. Just no way.” He looked uneasily back up the path they had come down. “I don’t think we can stop yet.” 

Lindsey nodded silently. She adjusted her stiff, wet jacket, seeming to wince. A drop of water dripped from its edge the ground by her boot. The drop was very, very dark on the ground, not like water at all.

“Lindsey, wait. No.” Gerard looked at the ground, suddenly comprehending her stiff, awkward movements. His head was shaking his head and he was reaching out for her.

She took a half-hearted step, pulling herself away from him, but didn’t take much more trouble to put up a fight. She stood, tired and woodenly acquiescent, as Gerard pulled her stiff wet jacket from her shoulders, and then her vest. As he took the vest off her, he could see the tear in its side, under her left arm.

“Christ, Lindsey,” he said softly. “Why didn’t you say.”

There was a bloom of red on her white shirt like the red kerchief she wore. The color ran in drips and sags from all the rain like the ruffles of a complicated flower. In the center, her shirt was torn. She moved to pull away again, but he shook his head.

“You gotta let me see,” he said softly, and she stayed where she was.

He worked the damp shirt free from her belt and and eased it up carefully, exposing her side. He frowned, willing himself to stay calm, to take in the sight of her bare white skin and the red underneath, where the skin was parted. It was a slanted graze about six inches long. The edges pulled away from each other. He blinked hard, trying to force himself to think through what he was seeing. It was wet, but it wasn’t bleeding, not right at that moment. There was blood in her shirt and clothes, but it was hard to tell how much was there and how much had been washed away by the rain. It was a graze—worse than the filly’s, but still just a graze, that was all. A bullet hole, one hole, would bleed less and be worse, he reasoned with himself roughly.

“How’s it look?” she asked, not looking herself.

“Oh,” he said carefully, “I’m not sure.”

“So there’s not a bullet in there, right?” she said toward the ceiling of the ledge.

“No,” he said. “I can see all of it, and there ain’t. It’s fairly clean, I suppose.”

“Good,” she said. “I didn’t think there was, truly I didn’t, but for a while it hurt so bad I wasn’t sure. It don’t hurt so bad now.” She made to lower her arms and let her shirt fall back into place.

He stopped her, making her keep her arms up. “Lindsey, hold still. For Christ’s sake.”

“You a doctor now?” she asked grimly, and for just a second, he saw a flash of dark humor in her eyes.

“More than you, I’d say,” he told her.

He started with her own kerchief, reaching under her hair to untie it as she held still, still holding her shirt stiffly up at the side. He folded it and lay the damp red cloth as carefully as he could against her skin. She winced but let him continue his ministrations. He rummaged in his saddle bags next, finding his other shirt and folding it awkwardly, then wrapping it around her like a bandage, crossing the shirt arms as tightly as he could on her opposite side, tucking them into her belt. He pulled her shirt down over his makeshift bandages.

He found an empty sack in another bag on Mariah’s saddle and used it to squeeze out the dripping ends of her hair and then his own. When he was done, he dropped it on the ground. Finally, he found a handkerchief of his, relatively dry, and tied it back around her neck. His saddle bags were nearly empty.

“Thank you,” she said, as he tied the kerchief. “That’s a little warm.”

“You’re cold because you’re hurt,” he told her, with as much thought for careful speaking as she had had for him on the road to Holly, saying she didn’t know if he’d wake up.

“Suppose you’re right about that,” she said.

He unrolled her blanket and she let him settle it around her shoulders. He set his blanket aside, intending to wrap Frank with it when they were moving again, and put some other odds and ends from the saddle bags in his pockets. The half-empty box of shells for his rifle. A few matches wrapped in tar paper. Something there wasn’t much of in the bags was food, but that made things easier now. He didn’t have to worry about finding a way to carry it.

When he’d gone through everything, he uncinched the straps, pulling them all the way free, and lifted the saddle off Mariah, and set it on the ground at the back of the overhang.

“What are you doing?” Lindsey asked. “I thought we were—”

“We’re going, all right.” Gerard said. “I just can’t do this no more. She’s tired, and she’s gotta carry us both. This damn thing ain’t helping any. It’s built for one and we don’t both fit, and it’s damned uncomfortable.” 

“Gerard, your saddle—” She looked back it on the ground.

“Doesn't matter,” he said roughly. “I don't care.” The saddle was one of about three things he owned that were worth anything. He couldn’t tell if he was being brave or foolish.

First, they wrestled Frank onto Mariah, Lindsey doing her awkward best to help him while favoring her side. They left Frank slumped over Mariah’s neck and Gerard threw the blanket up over his back. Then he stood by Lindsey as she mounted. She leaned against him for a moment as she struggled to lift her left foot into the stirrup. Once she had, she lifted herself carefully onto the filly’s back. Then he swung himself up onto Mariah’s back, adjusting the rifle in its strap across his back and gathering Frank into his arms.

They continued into the miserable night. As they moved out from under the ledge, a dark shape followed them, rousing itself from its perch above the rock outcropping and gliding behind them on silent wings. It dipped and soared, following them easily for a mile or so, and then rose higher and passed unacknowledged over their heads. It flew ahead of them to the south, a silent messenger.

 

#### The Flight to Socorro

They rode until the band of gray light in the east stretched wide across the horizon, until Lindsey called out to him that they had to stop.

“If we can sleep a little—just a little, just a couple hours, I can keep going after that,” she said. She sounded winded and weak, strangely breathless. They found a slight rise in the rocky ground, a bank of chaparral that would offer a little wind break, a little shade when the sun rose.

Lindsey stretched out on the ground as soon as she had pulled her saddle off the filly and was asleep before the next words he said to her. He pulled Frank down and tried again to make him drink something before stretching his blanket out on the ground for them both. On the ground, Frank seemed to sleep without discomfort. Maybe he would wake up soon, Gerard thought.

Gerard woke when the sun was full up. He stood up from their meager camp, leaving Lindsey and Frank still asleep, and walked a bit to stretch his legs. Now that is was daytime, he could see the mountains that stood against the horizon to the west. Their route had shadowed the Rocky Mountains at a distance all the way down from Holly, and here they were still, standing within arm’s reach of the mountains. Even at a distance, Gerard could tell that they were larger than anything he had ever seen, larger than the pleasant, hospitable hills that were called mountains in the east. He wondered idly what the world looked like on their other side.

Lindsey was sitting up when he strode back to camp.

“How you feeling?” he asked. 

She made a noncommittal sound. Her face looked flushed, with pink standing in her cheeks. She was pulling and smoothing her hair back, to tie it away from her face, but avoided using her left arm, Gerard noticed worriedly.

“So, we’re going south,” she said.

Gerard nodded slowly. “It seems further from the other places they been.” He sighed. “I don’t know, but we got ourselves pointed in that direction.”

“You see that?” She pointed north and then winced a little. A bank of blue clouds stood on the northern horizon. They seemed far away from them, but enormously tall, coming closer.  He felt certain they were the storm clouds that held the lightning and the stinging rain from Black Mesa.

“Well, shit,” he breathed, staring at them. The clouds were a presence in the sky, and Gerard could feel them there as solidly as the mountains at his right hand.

“South is away from that,” Lindsey said, “So that’s good.”

“Gerard, is that you?” Frank said sleepily, as Gerard tried to rouse him as they were readying to leave. But then he pulled his arms away again and again as Gerard tried to haul and bully him into mounting Mariah.

“We’re bound to run into something before long,” he said to Lindsey once he and Frank were situated on Mariah’s back. “Some people, a homestead. Then we can …” He paused for a moment, then let his voice trail off, finding he had nothing more to say.

He had heard of it on the plains, especially in the winter—homesteaders ready to run off travelers, willing to threaten them or shoot them. All a stranger meant was more mouths to feed, in a long winter when there was nothing anyway. He worried if they came upon the wrong type of homestead, they’d be run off with a rifle. But he didn’t know what else they would find. He wondered if they would meet any of the Spanish cowboys who lived in the south. He wondered how long they let their herds roam—if it was too late in the season to find them on the range. He wondered if they would be friendly.

Midmorning, they found they were coming up on a homestead, marked by a stubborn line of windbreak trees. As they got closer, they saw it was abandoned. Gerard looked around while Lindsey stayed in the saddle and minded Frank, holding Mariah’s reins in case he chose that moment to thrash about. The rude little house was empty and full of dust. There was a length broken fence behind it, and a small chicken house. In chicken house, Gerard found a sack with a musty dried corn in the bottom, less than a handful. He turned it for a moment in his hand and kept it.

Later on, they found a ridge of short, sturdy, bushy trees that proved to be apples. Their branches were dotted with tiny yellow fruits, twisted and misshapen from the boring of maggots. Gerard led Mariah close and pulled down some of the sad apples, hardly as big as his palm.

“Here.” He tossed one to Lindsey.

“I must confess, I ain’t too hungry right now,” she said. He hadn’t seen her eat all day, didn’t know if she had any food left. The pink was still in her cheeks. She put the apple in her pocket. “Maybe later.”

“Stop it,” Frank said sharply, and shook his arm away from Gerard, twisting against him.

Gerard held Frank til he quieted and then filled his pockets with more of the measly little scrub apples. He ate several with honest gratitude, spitting the seeds and the dark, mealy bits on the ground, and they rode on.

In the afternoon, Gerard looked up to a faraway ridge to the east and saw a row of horses and riders ranged along it. They were dark against the bright sky, and Gerard could see them sitting straight on their horses’ backs, long hair blowing over their shoulders. Apaches, he thought, or Kiowas, if he knew anything about this part of the world. The Indians west of Texas were supposed to be especially vicious, but Gerard couldn’t stop himself from raising his hat to them, waving it and hollering into the wind. They were far from camp themselves, it seemed, but maybe they had something that could help them. Something. He followed them hopefully with his eyes. They didn’t ride with saddles either, he noticed, with a small breath of comfort at the thought. His pants were stiff and sticky with Mariah’s sweat. They turned their heads at his call, but he watched as they rode on away from them without changing their course.

Between singing songs and talking to Frank in a low murmuring voice, Gerard sucked on dry kernels of corn from the abandoned chicken house until they were soft enough to chew and swallow. His stomach had hurt from hunger the first day. Today, he felt it less. The singing seemed to keep it away. He searched his mind for the longest songs he knew, the most rambling verses to pick and piece together before he had to move on to something else. But the songs he found himself singing were of the worst, most tragic sort.

He was started in on Little Joe The Wrangler before he noticed, into the story of the green young cowboy who came to the drive and met an untimely end when the cattle ran in a hailstorm, just before Red River. Wrangling was what Frank had done his first year on the drive, he always told Gerard. Even this summer, he took care to learn the name of every horse in the remuda and made up names for the ones that didn’t have them. Kind, ridiculous names, like Peppers and Daisy and Sweet Pea. Gerard’s voice caught on _our little Texas strayboy_ , and he stopped to compose himself.

“God damn these songs,” he said. “God damn them.”

“Just sing,” Lindsey said wearily from in front of him.

Gerard glanced at her back, how she held her arm braced against her thigh and leaned into it to try and sit straight. She was tired and hurting. He tried to let his concern for her overcome his moodiness and bring it to heel. He was concerned, about her and Frank both; he was wildly anxious with it, but it made him restless and angry instead of kind, as it should have. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand the urgency of their situation. His feelings just didn’t seem to follow his thinking that closely.

He started in on the song that came next, the one about Nell, Joe’s twin sister who rides out looking for him, which was just as bad as the original, maybe worse.

“I liked that,” Lindsey said when he had finished singing about Nell. “I never knew they had a song about a girl cowboy.” She had a peaceful, pleased look on her face, but her skin was pale and her eyes were very dark.

Night under the huge black sky was painful and long. Frank kept crying out, saying “Stop” or mumbling Gerard’s name. He seemed to do it about every time Gerard was nearly asleep. Lindsey leaned against her saddle awkwardly instead of lying down. Gerard didn’t ask her how she was feeling. As soon as light showed in the sky, they broke their miserable camp and moved on. In the early morning dimness, the clouds to the north seemed to have grown even larger. There had been no sign of pursuit other than the clouds but, Gerard thought, looking at them in the dark of the morning and feeling the skin crawl on his arms, they were enough.

 

They had ridden a few hours in the morning twilight when Lindsey pulled up the bay filly and pointed.

“Look,” she said.

Gerard followed her gesture to what looked like a figure on horseback ahead of them on a little hill. The rough trail dipped across a hollow in the land and beyond it, where the trail rose, a man sat on a stocky horse. The man and his horse were still, looking at them across the dip in the land as though they were waiting for them.

Hesitantly, Gerard raised his hat in a greeting. The man touched his hat and lowered his hand to his lap where the long shape of a shotgun rested. Gerard looked at Lindsey as she and the filly came to stand beside him. 

“Christ’s mother,” Lindsey muttered, turning back toward Gerard after surveying the man. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do but go over. Maybe he can tell us where we are. And where there is to go from here.”

Gerard adjusted his hold around Frank, who made a fitful sound like he might choose this inconvenient moment to rouse himself. Gerard nudged Mariah forward and she started down the low hill, closing the distance between them and the man.

The man quickly set his rifle to his shoulder and fired a shot that landed in the dip of the road with a puff of dust. Closest to the shot, the filly reared and wheeled, and Lindsey clutched at the reins and the saddle, doing all she could not to slide off the filly’s back before she settled. Mariah kicked her feet and trotted several yards off the trail before Gerard managed to pull her in.

“What the hell?” Gerard called raggedly, heart racing, one hand tight on Mariah’s reins and the other across Frank’s chest. He found he had pulled Mariah across the path, placing himself between Lindsey and the man.

The man gestured, shotgun now loose in his hands, pointing toward the trail. From this angle, Gerard could see a large snake, a thick coil of gold and brown diamonds under some scrub sagebrush. It was still, its coil only partly disturbed by the rifle shot. Gerard was suddenly certain that its head was gone, neatly obliterated by the spread of buckshot from the man’s gun. 

“Copperhead,” the man said shortly. “Only one. Come on over, now.”

After exchanging glances with Lindsey, Gerard allowed Mariah to move warily into the dip in the road. The bay filly tossed her head and followed shortly.

“Sorry bout your horses,” the man called. His voice was gruff and sounded angry, even though his words were conciliatory. “I didn’t see it—it didn’t move til she did.” His wide face was burnt dark gold and red by the sun, and his hair and eyebrows were the same pale red gold, as though the sun had bleached the color from them.

“Do you know where you are?” he asked as they approached.

“No, sir,” Gerard said. “Not a bit. We started out in Cimarron County, but we come a ways since then.”

“Cimarron County. That is a ways,” the man said. “You’re about 25 miles out from Socorro, southwest from here.” He scowled. “Little town. Good place. I’m from there. Name’s Bob,” he added, giving a little nod that didn’t match the glower on his face.

“Your friend, there.” Bob said, turning his scowl toward Frank. “What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s sick,” Lindsey said. “We ran into some trouble a ways back.” She matched Bob’s short sentences easily, not volunteering any information.

“And how about you?” Bob asked. He turned to look at Lindsey and eyed her with some concern. “You don’t look good, miss. If you’ll forgive me for saying.” Lindsey didn’t answer him.

Bob looked between them suspiciously. “You running?” he asked. “Is there people following you?”

Gerard let himself glance back to the north. The blue clouds were still there, massed menacingly in the sky. As soon as he looked, he wished he hadn’t. Bob’s eyes went from him and Lindsey to the sky behind them, following where Gerard had looked. Bob looked back at them after a moment and frowned at them mightily, his light eyebrows drawn together in a rough line.

Bob pulled his mount closer to Mariah and reached to put his hand on Frank’s face. He lifted Frank’s eyelids with a thumb, first one, then the other. Frank didn’t flinch or react to his touch.

“He can’t ride by himself, can he?” Bob asked.

Gerard shook his head.

“You think your horse can still run? With two riding?”

Gerard nodded mutely. He felt Mariah’s muscles under him. Of all of them, she seemed least damaged by what they had been through. He could feel that she still had miles in her, even then. He could also feel her anxiety, her growing understanding that something was deeply wrong with Frank and Lindsey both. She would be ready to run.

Bob turned to Lindsey. “You think you can ride with him, if this one’s going faster?” He indicated Mariah with a look. “No offense, ma’am, but I think you and him both need to hurry.”

“I’m listening,” she said, without any feeling in her voice.

“This road goes west, to the Rio Grande,” Bob explained. “It’s flat, clear, you can make some time. You’ll get to the river soon, then you follow the river valley south. When you see the mission, that’s Socorro. Ain’t much but the place where a few ranch lands come together, but, well, I think you all could do with being in a place where there’s some people. When you get to town, ride into the square. Don’t try anything funny, just ride in and wait. Someone’ll take you to Ray.”

“To Ray?” Gerard interrupted, irritated that even now, there were more variables. What Bob was suggesting made sense, but he was suddenly reluctant to part from Mariah and not certain he would be able to unwrap his arms from around Frank.

“Yup,” Bob said matter-of-factly. “Lawman in town there, name of Ray Toro. He keeps the peace. He won’t like that you’re that you’re mixed up in . . . the trouble you got going on,” Bob’s eyes went to the horizon and the clouds again. “But he’ll treat you fair, you can count on that. And you two will get what help you need—that’s most important right now. The rest of it, well,” Bob sighed. “We’ll cross that bridge later. You get yourself there, talk to Ray. Tell him Bob sent you. Tell him we’ll be back soon.”

Lindsey looked at him and then at Gerard.

“I think we need to,” Gerard said, having made up his mind Bob’s promise of people, of Lindsey and Frank getting the help they needed.

She gave Bob another baleful glance, as though the situation was his fault, and not the fault of all the trouble they had come on so far, and slid herself out of the saddle. She grunted and staggered a step when her feet hit the ground, muttering a curse under her breath. She came to stand by Mariah, and Gerard set about exchanging places with her.

He put his mouth next to Frank’s ear and whispered, “Frank, you gotta stay up here. Lindsey’s gonna ride with you. Do you hear me? You’re gonna be fine.”

Frank blinked and turned. “Gerard?” he said, in a cracked voice.

“Frank, here, you just drink something,” Lindsey said, handing him her flask. He held it for a moment, confused, and then slowly brought it to his lips. Gerard dismounted and offered Lindsey his laced hands, letting her step into them to climb to Mariah’s back.

“Okay, Frank,” she said. She settled herself against him, wrapped her arm around his waist. She pressed him forward, preparing them both to lean into Mariah’s gait, and his hands found their way to Mariah’s neck.

“Okay, girl,” Gerard said, putting his hand against Mariah’s powerful shoulder for a moment. “Okay, Mariah, go on.”

He stepped away from them and Lindsey urged her forward. Mariah started down the trail readily, and Lindsey pushed her into a lope.

Gerard grabbed the filly’s reins and mounted, surprised at the feeling of a saddle under him again, at the stature of a smaller horse. The filly flicked her ear back at him. Now that he was nearer, Gerard could see that Bob’s mount was a mule, with its enormous ears and softly slanted eyes. Apart from its height, it looked to be a little more than half donkey. The mule strained its head against the bridle that Bob held tightly, like he would turn and nip at the filly if he had his head. He let the filly sidestep away. 

They looked up the trail, watching the riders disappear with another rise and curve of the road. “You hungry?” Bob said to Gerard, and then, without waiting for an answer, fumbled in his saddle bags to produce several pieces of dried meat. He leaned to hand them to Gerard, who attacked them ravenously.

“Well, then,” Bob said, seeming to speak to no one, or perhaps to his mule. “That’s that.” He pulled the mule back a bit and dismounted. His spurs made a loud jingling sound as he walked. He went to the copperhead’s body and picked it up by the tail. The mule watched him closely, wary of the snake, even though it was lifeless.

“Maybe I’ll get a pair of boots outta this,” Bob said. He snorted. “Probably not. Maybe a hat band.” He scooped the snake’s body into a sack and tied the top. The mule relaxed a bit once the snake’s body was out of view.

Bob glanced at it. “You woulda killed this yourself if we were close enough, wouldn’t you.” He scratched its jaw, careful to hold the sack on the other side of his body, away from the mule’s head. “You ornery son of a bitch.” The mule squeezed its lips and momentarily revealed its enormous teeth, seeming to flash Bob a grin.

Bob tied the sack to the back of his saddle and climbed on the mule’s back again. Gerard watched as he mounted. His spurs had enormous rowels, built like wide, sharp stars. Mexican spurs, Gerard thought. Attached to the centers were the bits of metal that made the jingling sound when he walked. 

“Your mule, is he hard to handle?” Gerard asked, looking at the elaborate spurs.

“Oh, he’s fine, he just got plenty of his own ideas about what he wants to do.” Bob chuckled, grinning into his beard. “He’s a stubborn son of a bitch, but I reckon we deserve each other in that regard.”

They started down the road, the mule in the lead.

“So you been riding since Cimarron County,” Bob said to Gerard after a time, an invitation to say more.

“Yes, sir,” Gerard said. “We been looking for a safe place to stop for about two days. We didn’t find nothing.”

“That so,” Bob said, casting a wary look at him. “Well.” He cleared his throat and, after a second of deliberation, seemed to decide to forge ahead. “You ridden past some things, I can tell you that. There was Fort Union up north, and Bell Ranch and Maxwell House. Hell, Albuquerque’s not too far back. But, I suppose, if you weren’t on the road, and all you saw was the mountains…” He rubbed his beard and frowned, the same concern coming back into his face as when he had looked at the storm clouds. 

Gerard thought of the bank of clouds that dogged them and wondered how much vision the clouds had obscured. He wondered how long they would’ve been wandering if they hadn’t been stopped by the sight of Bob and his mule on the little west-leading road. Maybe they would’ve died in the desert, or ended up down in Mexico, he thought. He didn’t know two things about Mexico, apart from the spurs. Under the enormous sky, he suddenly felt very far from home. The mule led them away at a quick walk and the filly followed gamely. The wound on her rump was dry, and she seemed only a little stiff.

Bob turned out to be a surprisingly able conversationalist. His voice was gruff, but he was quick to offer commentary on most things they saw, raising an arm now and then to point something out—the road that led to Albuquerque, the Manzano Mountains and Capilla Peak, the way the green ribbon of the Rio Grande valley snaked toward them from the west as they climbed over a rocky rise in the land. Gerard supposed his own sensibilities about companionable trail behavior had been warped a bit by his last weeks of silent travel with Lindsey.

Bob talked more about Socorro, the little town they were going to, and the lawman Ray Toro who had somehow elected to be responsible for it, who seemed bent on molding the little town into something more than a wild country way station, despite how distant it was from everything resembling civilization. It seemed strange. Not a fool’s errand, exactly, just out of place. Gerard had seen less care taken for law and order in the towns of south Texas, which had been a state now for decades. Still, though his gruff way obscured it, Bob spoke with enough length and fondness about the town that Gerard could clearly see Bob’s strong loyalty to it and the lawman who ran it.

“Ray wants order, not trouble. None of this vigilante gunslinging that folks out here seem so fond of. That don’t make for a good place to live, and he won’t have none of it. After enough talk, I suppose I mostly come around to agree with him on that topic.” Bob said. “He takes care of Socorro. It’s a safe place, and it’s gonna stay that way. Which is why you all need to take care with what trouble you got following you.” Bob gave him a glowering look that encompassed Frank and Lindsey as well, despite their absence.

Then Bob’s talked ranged to simpler topics—the longhorns on the ranch along the river, how the high desert changed through the seasons, the improbable flowers that bloomed in the spring, how the owls called after dark. In all his talk, Gerard gathered that he was the blacksmith on Toro ranch, and the farrier for all the animals that needed it. He glanced over at Bob’s rough hands and saw the scars that laced up his arms, indication enough of his livelihood. Going up a slight hill, he watched for a glimpse of the mule’s shoes, which looked fine enough. Maybe he would ask Bob to look at Mariah’s feet when all this mess had passed by. Assuming he and Mariah and any of them made it past whatever came next. He had the sense that things would be over soon, but it was impossible to imagine what that would mean.

In time, Bob’s conversation turned back to Socorro. He was anxious to be back there, Gerard realized, and chafing at the hours on the road. In all his comings and going, Gerard had scarcely had that yearning toward anywhere, but he sensed it in Bob’s words—the man’s sense of home.

“Ray, he takes care of it,” Bob was saying again. “It’s a good place. They got medicine, of course, and … well, other things, too, and that’ll be good for their ills. If the horse can hold that pace, they’ll be there soon.”

Gerard nodded, thinking of Lindsey and Frank on the road.

“So, how’d you find yourselves into so much trouble?” Bob finally broached the subject directly.

Gerard drew a deep breath, thinking over the past weeks. The time he and Frank had spent in Abilene—little more than a day—seemed cruelly, unspeakably brief. The Bar N drive felt as though it had happened to someone else, in another lifetime. The blind panic over Frank, and his own lack of faith in what he had seen keeping him frozen there for weeks. The interminable days on the road with Lindsey and the unnatural magic of the prayer meeting. And Lindsey herself—the woman whose side he’d ridden at for weeks now, sad and rough and harder than anyone should have to be. And still she kept shocking him—the gun in her jacket in Dodge City, the brothel in Holly, and her with the pistol in her hand at Black Mesa, standing in the saddle and firing like a regular gunslinger. Frank, captured back but not yet returned to them. And the man on the top of the mesa, the blood he had on his own hands now—he had scarcely begun to acknowledge that. And over all of it, the preacher man and his dark interference loomed.

“Can’t say for sure,” Gerard said after a time, though, of course, it wasn’t an answer. “It all came on us a little unexpected.” He sounded like Lindsey, cagey and terse, untrusting.

 

By noon they arrived at the river and turned south again. They kept the Big River at their right side for several hours and then Bob led them down through the trees and brush to its edge. Their mounts waded into the muddy-bottomed flow, letting the sluggish water slide around their ankles—toward their knees in some places, but not much higher. The brown water was low and slow from the months of dry summer, but the river was very, very wide.

From time to time that day, Gerard turned back toward the north. The heaped, knotted clouds rose in the sky, blue and black, keeping pace with them as Bob and Gerard rode. They weren’t gaining on them, but they certainly didn’t appear to be receding, either. Gerard wondered what would happen when they came to a stop in Socorro that night and the clouds were given a chance to overtake them. His memories of the night at Black Mesa were already swimming to a confusing blur, but the lightning and the rain had attacked them with such viciousness, it was hard not to attribute evil intention to the massed clouds as they sat on the horizon.

They arrived at Socorro when dusk was in the sky. There were a scattering of small houses to the north and they walked through those first. Some were wooden, but many were low buildings with smooth walls made from red mud that Bob called adobe. As Gerard turned his eyes toward the rest of the town, he saw that most of the buildings were like that, low and flat, with beams of wood pushing out from the sides of their low roofs. In the center of the town, which they came on soon enough, there was a wide open square. On the west side, Gerard saw the mission. It was an adobe building with a tall pitched roof and two bell towers and a long, low wall that circled the courtyard before it. It was terribly red in the dying light.

A large wooden cross stood in the yard. Gerard frowned at it. It called to mind the preacher man and his God-talk, the terrifying sermon he had given about God’s encompassing, incontrovertible purpose, disguised as love. But everything here looked so different from the church buildings and prayer meetings he knew. Catholics and their priests was another thing he didn’t know two bits about. Would the priest inside the mission be as threatening and horrible as the preacher man, or was it different somehow, now that they were here?

He followed Bob past the mission, past a tiny graveyard beside it where stones stood in the ground like dull white teeth. The road led away from the square and brought them to a low, sprawling house, barn and outbuildings stretching away behind it. The house’s porch was hung with dried red chiles that Gerard would learn to call ristras. A man stood up from the darkness of the porch. Gerard could hear the creaking wooden boards and the jingling of spurs as he walked to the edge of the porch. He stood and watched them dismount. His hands moved in the dusky light and Gerard saw that he was lowering a rifle, resting its butt on the ground. He was wearing woolly chaps of thick sheepskin.

“Been waiting for you to get here,” the man said to Bob. “Didn’t much like it that you were out on the road with all these problems afoot.” He had on a wide flat hat with a band that seemed to shine golden in the dark. The copperhead hat band Bob wanted, Gerard thought he wanted to be like this man.  The man’s hair hung to his chin in curls beside his face.

Bob made a grunting noise that was both grumpy and familiar. “I found them, didn’t I?” he asked. “Those other ones—I trust you got em here somewhere.”

Then they turned to Gerard.

“Gerard, this is Ray Toro,” Bob said.

Gerard shook the man’s hand solemnly.

“Sir, thank you for taking care of my friends. I don’t know what else we would of done.”

“You don’t seem in too bad of shape,” Ray said, looking him up and down.

“No, sir,” Gerard said, feeling a tinge of shame. “I think both of them borne the worst of our troubles, honestly.” He wished for a way he could show Ray that he had done all he could.

“Well,” Ray said, “Your friends are both asleep now, but they seem to be doing all right. That woman, Lindsey, she managed to scrape herself up pretty good.”

“Yes sir, she did. And Frank?” Gerard asked.

“He was asleep most of the afternoon, but he was up this evening. Talked to us. Ate a little. He seemed better,” Ray said. “Don’t worry. You can rest easy tonight.”

Ray and Bob exchanged a few words and then Ray left them. Bob walked Gerard into the hallways of the long house. He rummaged in the large kitchen to find them both something to eat and then walked Gerard down one of the hallways to a room with a bed.

“Your friends, they’re just down the hall,” Bob said, before leaving him for the night.

Gerard stood in the room for a moment looking at the bed that stood in the center like a stone. It was lonely and strange. He took his boots off and crept down the hall, stopping in front of a closed door. He listened for a moment and, hearing nothing, eased it open as quietly as he could.

At the table by the door, he could see a water pitcher, a washbasin, rags and bandages, the trappings of a sick room. In the low light, he could make out two small beds. Frank was in the nearest. He was still and his face looked peaceful. He looked like himself. Gerard marveled at the change since the morning. On a table beside his bed, a burning candle flickered in a glass, providing the only light. Next to the candle stood a picture and folded in front of it on the table was a white handkerchief. Gerard squinted, trying to see what the picture was. It looked like a woman in a crown with long flowing hair that covered her shoulders, but her eyes were large and strange, cavernous in her pale face. He looked again. The white shape on the table wasn’t a handkerchief; it was a flower. The candle flame bobbed merrily and the whole tableau looked like an offering at a little shrine.

Lindsey was in the farther bed, her black hair spread out over the pillow. As he watched, she shifted under the covers. The shadows from the little candle stretched and moved on her face. He stood for a moment, hoping she would wake and he could talk to her. But then she turned and her breathing stilled again, and she was deep asleep.

Satisfied for the moment, Gerard went back to the room Bob had given him. He slept well.

 

In the morning, Gerard found them all in the large kitchen room, where long tables stretched away from the iron cook stove. A large stone fireplace was set in the wall and a low fire burned there to chase away the morning’s chill.

As he entered the room, Frank saw him and stood. His face was tired and his eyes were smudged with dark, but his gaze was clear and he smiled, something near the huge grin that Gerard remembered on his face from before, when times were better. Gerard caught him in an enormous, familiar hug and they stood there for a long moment with their arms tight around each other.

“Frank, Frank,” he said, and couldn’t think of anything else but to say his name.

They stood apart. Frank cleared his throat and said gruffly, “Well.” Gerard squeezed his shoulder hard.

Then he turned to Lindsey, who stood near the fireplace. Her face was quiet but her eyes were pleased.

“Girl,” he said, and put his arms out to her, not certain how she would respond. She came to him and they embraced cautiously. He was mindful of not touching her left side, and aware of the soft feeling of her shiny, loose hair against his face. She felt so small in his arms compared to how he had come to see her.

Ray and Bob gave them food—hot cornbread, greasy with butter, beans, stew with carrots and thick chunks of beef. Bob pulled the hot food in heavy pots from over the fire and brought it to the table. He presided over it with a spoon and dished out heaping portions to each of them. But he came to Frank and Frank pulled his plate away.

“Oh no, I won’t,” Frank said. “No, thank you.” He put his arm around his plate, shielding it, as though worried Bob might ladle stew onto it against his wishes.

“Frank?” Bob said.

“I won’t eat that.” He shook his head at the stew. “Cows are friendly, and I won’t hear anything otherwise,” he said firmly. He reached around Bob to pile his plate high with beans and cornbread and refused to say another thing about it.

“You’re talking now,” Gerard said with a smile. He meant for it to be a joke, making light of last horrible days since Black Mesa.

Frank looked at him, but his eyes were pinched and sad, and there was no trace of his grin.

“Hey, now, hey,” Gerard said, immediately chagrined. “I didn’t mean it.”

Frank stayed quiet and they ate their food. Gerard put his hand on the back of Frank’s neck and let it rest there, warm and protective. He hadn’t known Frank would still be so fragile, and it shook him, making him hate the preacher man all the more.

After they ate, Ray stood and stacked up their dishes.

“Why don’t you walk around a little, see the place,” Bob told them, gesturing them to the door. “We got some things we got to discuss. I expect he’ll want you back in here before long.”

 

Outside in the late morning, they walked over the grounds of Ray’s ranch without much to say. When they first came outside, Gerard and Lindsey turned to the north and, sure enough, the clouds were there, blue and threatening, beginning to reach out further toward them in the sky. Gerard still felt full and peaceful from the meal but, seeing the clouds, feeling how Frank stiffened at the sight of them, he knew that the feeling of sanctuary wouldn’t last for long.

They walked away from the house, along the corral fences in the back, past the building with the stone chimney and Bob’s forge, where the walls were hung with hammers of different sizes, past the barn and a chicken coop. The ground was dry, with tufts of dry yellow grass intermixed with stretches of light red and golden rocks. The land sloped gently down to where the river lay, swelling into the greenery that surrounded it. By the trees near the river, Gerard could see a few groups of the longhorn cattle, dark red and dappled white, their enormous curving horns so large he wondered how they could turn their heads. He looked at the cattle for a bit and realized even the cows had horns like that. The only ones without them were the calves. It was coming to fall and the calves had a full season of growth on them, large but young, standing cautiously next to their mothers like overgrown children.

They made their way back toward the town square. People moved contentedly in the square, and they kept apart from them. Gerard couldn’t imagine having a conversation with someone right now. He was at a loss to explain even the most basic facts about where he was from and why he had come here. The mission was quiet and they circled the courtyard and walked by the tiny graveyard at the side, gazing at the stones from behind the fence.

There was a small outbuilding at the back of the fence. When they made their aimless way there, Lindsey called them around the corner.

“Look,” she said. There was a quietness in her voice. “Come here, and look at this.”

The building was open on two sides, really more of a covered shed, and standing inside it was a rough table covered with … many things. Gerard’s eyes took it in gradually. There was the brightly colored cloth, reds and greens, that draped from the table to the floor. On the cloth, nestled into folds and drapes, were candles of every height moored in puddled wax, as though they had been burned one after the other in those places for some time. There were a few candles in glasses, and of those, a handful were burning, faithfully casting their faint light even in the daytime. Among the candles were beads and flowers, and pictures of different sizes. The pictures all showed the same woman. Gerard recognized the images—it was the woman in the picture at Frank’s bedside by the burning candle. But seeing more likenesses of this woman and seeing them closer, it was clear that she was a skeleton, with a bleached white skull and cavernously empty holes for eyes. Flowers were everywhere in the pictures, trailing down her robe, framing her skeletal face.

Gerard frowned and stepped back. This makeshift building, set just at the outskirts of the mission and the holy ground of the cemetery, was an altar to this skeleton woman, he realized. The sight of it left him chilly. Lindsey was examining the pictures, leaning over the table, closer than he would have been comfortable to get. Frank stood somberly, hat in his hand. Gerard moved back to the side of the building, wanting to keep his distance. Leaves brushed against him. A green vine grew up the side of the building, reaching toward the roof. Its leaves were plentiful, showing no signs of fading with the coming autumn, and there were closed buds on it everywhere.

He waited quietly until Frank and Lindsey were ready to pull themselves away from the altar. None of them spoke. As they turned, they saw Bob walking purposefully across the field toward them.

“Well,” he said, when he reached them, sounding sheepishly formal. “Ray says we all oughta come on in. We need to talk.”

He marshaled them and they followed him back inside the house.

 

#### Ray and The Trial

They filed back in to the room with the fireplace and the long table. Compared to the warmth and noise of the room when they had eaten, it was quiet now, solemn as a judge’s chambers.

Ray was there, waiting for them sitting near the end of one of the long tables. Inside the doorway, Bob gestured them toward the table while he sat in a chair by the fireplace, near to Ray’s right hand. From where he sat, he could still hear everything easily, but he was set apart from them, a listener only.

Gerard and Frank shuffled uncertainly to the table and sat down a little apart from Ray, nearer to Bob. Gerard glanced at Bob and his face was impassive, not encouraging. Gerard could feel how he and Frank huddled uneasily toward each other. He felt certain they were being called to answer for something—for all the trouble that had dogged them since Abilene, trouble he could hardly believe, let alone speak for.

Lindsey, coming in the door last, paused near where Gerard had sat down, as though she might sit by him, joining their awkward huddle at the end of the table away from Ray. Then something changed in her face, and Gerard see her straighten up. She walked past them to the end of the table and took a seat directly across from Ray. She set her black hat on the bench beside her, shook back her hair, and faced him.

The room was quiet for a time. Ray eyes went over each of them. Lindsey looked back at him. Frank sat quietly, eyes on his hands folded in his lap. Gerard managed to keep his anxious shifting on the bench to a minimum.

“Well,” Ray began. His voice was calm. There was no trace of bullying or deceit in it, but the room was silent as they hung on his words.

“I figured we should talk a little,” Ray said. “You’re our guests, and I want to treat you with respect. But by the same token, you ain’t been here long, so you may not know how we do things around here.”

“We know you got yourself in with some kind of trouble, something a little unnatural. Those storm clouds on the horizon ain’t breaking up. We’ve seen them there for days now, and that’s why I sent Bob out. To find what they were, and what we should do.”

“But now you’re here,” Ray continued, “And we seen some of what you been through. So why don’t you tell us a little more about what is is you’re mixed up in.”

Lindsey shifted in her seat, glanced down the table at Frank and Gerard. She met their eyes briefly to make sure they had no objection to her becoming the teller of their story.

“There’s a man,” she said, “And I think we know well enough to say that he’s following us. He’s got these …” She paused, searching for the right way to say it. “He’s got these other men with him, who do what he says.  He’s an evil man, with unnatural gifts. He can do things that … aren’t right. The clouds are part of that.”

“How many men is he coming with?” Ray asked.

“There were eight of us when I was with them,” Frank volunteered. “Eight of us and him.”

“You were with his men?” Ray asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I was,” Frank said, “But I never wanted to be, and I ain’t now, as you can see. I got these two to thank for that.” Frank nodded at Gerard and Lindsey. “They came up and they rescued me. Otherwise, I’d be there still, on top of that god damn mesa in his ugly hideout, waiting to do whatever evil things he told me.”

Ray looked at Frank thoughtfully, seeming to puzzle together the pieces of the story with what he had already seen—Frank’s condition when he arrived, Lindsey’s wounds, their flight in the desert.

“It was three days ago when we met them.” Gerard spoke up. “Two of them died at Black Mesa, I can say that. Whatever those men are, two of em are dead now.”

“Two?” Lindsey asked. She turned from Ray to look at him.

“Yes, two,” Gerard said. “One on the top of the mesa, before I got Frank away.” Gerard couldn’t hold her gaze, thinking of that man, the only man he’d ever killed in his life. The first man, he amended, because he didn’t know what the next days would hold. The thought made his stomach turn. He wished the thing that was coming could be forestalled somehow. He feared that it couldn’t.

“So they’re coming, and they mean you harm.” Ray looked away from them, pondering. “And what do you plan to do, when they come?” He looked back at Lindsey.

Lindsey was quiet under his gaze. Then she said, “If he's so fool as to come here, as I believe he will be, I plan to kill him.”

“In cold blood?” Ray asked.

“Yes sir, that’s exactly what I plan.”

Ray nodded slowly, hearing her. Then he said gravely, “If Bob explained anything about this place, I imagine he told you: We don’t do that here. I won’t allow it. I seen too much out in these parts of how a town goes when you let anyone wield a gun against others, when you let people take justice into their own hands.”

“It’s not what I want for this place. And the people who live here, they agree with me. This is my town. And you can’t stay here, if that’s what you intend to do. I won’t have it.” Ray said it and shook his head, pained. She looked at him, her face hard.

_My town_ , Gerard thought. He thought of how fondly Bob had spoken of this place on the trail before they’d arrived. Gerard could feel the protection of the river valley around them, and he didn’t want to leave it. The thought of going back into the desert to face the preacher man and his goons—and doing it on their own, same as they’d done on the mesa, but with no surprise on their side—it seemed impossible and foolhardy.

“Miss,” Ray said. “Lindsey. I have to ask you, why? Before I even consider what you’re saying, I need to know why.”

Lindsey nodded slowly, appearing to hear him as he had heard her.

“I’ll tell you about him,” she said, and her voice got just a bit clearer so she was speaking to all of them. “I’ll tell you, and see if what I say might come to change your mind.”

 

#### Lindsey's Story

She looked at her hands for a bit, collecting her thoughts. Then she began.

“He’s been an evil, cruel man from the beginning, ever since I known him. Even before he was … what he is now,” she said.

“When I was young, he would shout at my mama—it was like the house was full of blue clouds, like a thunderstorm rolled in off the plains. He said the most terrible, blaming things to her. His voice—it made it impossible to think. I would forget things, sometimes. I know I did, especially when I was younger. Things he did, to her and to me, they went right out of my head.

After their fights, my mother—I don’t know for sure. It’s not that she didn’t remember, it’s just that what he did didn’t seem to work quite the same way on her. All the hateful things he said—it was like she didn’t care. She would excuse him of anything. He was a poor man, she would always tell me. He was poor as a sharecropper, and we didn’t have no hope of making anything of our lives in the east. She said that over and over, as if it was somehow an excuse. 

That’s why they decided to come west. I was just a girl, about eleven, and my sister was younger, five years younger than me. I don’t know that she ever truly saw what he was, and I’m glad of that, at least.”

“So this man, he’s your blood—your father,” Ray said.

“He is,” Lindsey said, her voice a little stiff. “I wish it weren’t so, but it is.”

“What happened next?” Ray asked.

Lindsey’s eyes looked away somewhere else as she sat at the long table, looking back into the past. 

“He came west first,” she said slowly. “He traveled with a wagon train. We were supposed to come out after, when he’d built the farm—somewhere. I don’t even know if they knew where they intended to end up. But somewhere.

But the wagon train he was on didn’t make it. It broke up and everyone in it disappeared, died, no one knows. I couldn’t find no record of it—only a notice of the last place it passed through.

In those records, I found a funny thing. It said there was a minister with them on the wagon train, a traveling preacher who was coming west to ride the circuits. That opportunity—it must of been too much temptation for him. He took those preacher’s clothes, he took his Bible and his coat and his hat. I imagine all he was thinking about was the money at first, about how a preacher can ask for an offering, how people give because they want to support God’s good work. But then he started talking to people, he saw how people were before him—how they would call him pastor, and trust him with their shame and their secret hearts. Just wanting to be forgiven. Just wanting his approval. He was made for that, for cows like that, willing to follow the sound of a man’s voice, no matter what he said to them. The way he could shame people, the hateful things he would say. I guess that was perfect for preaching.

She sighed. “I don’t know that it happened right then, or in that particular way, but it may as well have. Somehow, when he came out west, he became this preacher man.

The room was quiet. Lindsey’s eyes looked to the faraway place again for a moment, and she started in on a part of the story Gerard had never heard, had been waiting to hear from her the whole time.

“We didn’t hear from him for some time,” Lindsey said. “I liked that fine. It was so good to have him gone.” There was relief in her face as she remembered it. But then her face turned sour.

“My mother, though, she couldn’t understand what good fortune we’d come on, couldn’t understand to leave well enough alone. She decided we’d come west too. She said we’d find him. She brought us, of course, we were too young to do anything but come with her. We made it out as far as Holly, Colorado, a little nowhere town, and she decided she’d stay there. We didn’t even get to Denver.”

Lindsey paused, her face dark. “It was horrible there,” she said. “Not because of Holly, but because of her. I don’t know what ever made her think she could live in a frontier town, or that she wanted to be anywhere out West. She always acted like she thought she’d find something out there, but it was just us in the middle of a whole lot of nothing. She seemed to loose track of things, of everything, once we were there. She could of sewn, or cleaned, or something. But she didn’t do nothing.”

“It was pretty clear soon enough we didn’t have no money. The people of Holly were kind to me and my sister. There were a lot things that got given to us, I know that. Dresses and bonnets—my sister and I always had clothes. And bread and potatoes and eggs.” Lindsey shook her head. “It made me ashamed, to live like that.”

“Then, that last winter, my sister got sick. The doctor came—free, of course, we didn’t have no money to pay him with—and he saw how she coughed, how it was like something evil was in her lungs that wouldn’t come out. He gave her laudanum for her cough, to help her sleep. It did seem to do that in those first days. But he saw my mother, all pale and frightened and aimless. It’s good for nerves, too, he told her. And  for your female complaints. Just be careful you don’t take it too often, he said. He left the bottle with her, just another gift from the goodwill of the people of Holly that had supported us for so long. And so she did.”

“By that time, I was working. Miss Sadie had—well, took me in, I guess you could say, and I was grateful for that. She wasn’t weak like my mother was. Even at fourteen, I could tell that, and I loved her for it.” For a moment, Lindsey’s voice was wet with tears that didn’t fall.

“I told my mother I had found a job cooking, but of course I wasn’t cooking. I cleaned at first, swept the floors and straightened the rooms. Sadie let me start there. She never asked me to do nothing but what I was game for. But I talked with the other girls and I saw the money the men paid them. I saw it and I wanted it.”

Lindsey paused, collecting herself. “It was early one morning, and I was coming home from the Holly Blossom. The room was very quiet. They were both lying in bed so peacefully. It took me a while to realize they weren’t breathing, not her nor my sister. I saw the laudanum bottle on the bedside table, but I didn’t do nothing about it. What could I do?

I got in bed with them, just like I would any other night. I got under the covers, but I didn’t sleep none. I lay there listening to how quiet it was, how my sister didn’t cough any and my mother wasn’t restless no more. I lay there with them til the sun came up.”

Gerard saw it as she described it, the desolate sunlight of that first morning without them.

“And that was pretty much it,” she said. Though after a moment, she went on musingly. “You know, my father would talk about heaven and Kingdom Come til he was blue in the face, but I suppose I don’t share his views about that. When I saw they were dead, I could tell they were just gone. I could feel it. They weren’t here no more.

And I suppose I always thought that if they went somewhere, it was somewhere very far away, where none of this could reach them. Someplace that didn’t have anything to do with you or me. It made me glad, and I still am glad. I was glad it was over for them, that they got to go away.”

 

She finished the story and the room was quiet. The fire had died down to embers, and no one had stoked it or gotten out candles or lamps. The afternoon light had turned away from the windows. But in the shadowed room, Gerard could see the faces of everyone around the table. Frank had marks on his cheeks that shone when he turned his head. Bob made a gruff coughing sound and elaborately wiped his nose. Gerard sighed and wiped his own eyes. This was the story he thought he had been waiting to hear from Lindsey. He had always known that something powerful motivated her, but he hadn’t dreamed it would be quite like this.

Alone among them, Ray’s face was still, solemn and considering.

Lindsey said to him, “I tell you, I been thinking on it. For four years now, I thought on it, and I say it’s what he owes me. A life for a life. And I'm not even saying my mama. A hundred things could of happened to her. She was fragile, and she certainly wasn’t meant for no frontier life. She should of stayed where she was and never come out here at all. I'm saying my sister. If my little sister had had someone to take care of her, she'd be alive today.”

Lindsey folded her hands on the table, still looking solidly at Ray. “He owes me for that. And I’m telling you, If I lay eyes on him again, it ends with one of us dead.”

Ray waited for a time.

“And you expect me to stand aside while you do that?” he asked. “I’m telling you, that’s not what I want for this town. Guns and vigilante justice. No.” He shook his head. His voice was still calm, but his face had a closed off look. 

“What would you do?” Lindsey retorted. 

“We have a jail here. It’s not big, but it could hold a man.”

“You have a jail here.” She repeated it back to him coldly. “And what would you do while you held him? What about the ones taking care of him, bringing him food and emptying his shit bucket? Would you stop their ears, make it so he couldn’t speak to them? How would you do that?”

Ray considered silently.

“Do you try men here?” Lindsey asked, still prodding him sharply. “Do you hang them?”

“No,” Ray said. “We have a circuit judge who’s shared out to the south of the state of California. He comes here about every six weeks if the weather’s good.”

“Do you think I should tell my sad story to a circuit court judge?” Lindsey asked, her eyes dark and cutting. “You think a judge would believe this?”

Ray was silent for a long time.

“No,” he said finally. “I don’t see that he would.” He tried again, asking her in a different way. “You hold him responsible for all this, for everything that happened to your family?”

“Of course I do.” Lindsey said, and the depths of bitterness in her voice made Gerard cringe. “Only a man would twist it like that, to say it was my mother’s fault, or someone else’s, or mine, or nobody’s—when he’s been to blame since the beginning. Can’t you see that?”

Ray sighed deeply and his eyes held hers.

“I can see it,” he said finally.

The room was quiet while Ray deliberated. He sat for a long time. He stood and paced, and still, they sat there waiting. The light had turned while they were sitting inside, going from afternoon to early evening. For a moment, clouds seemed to reach over the sun. Outside the window in the false dusk, an owl called. Frank turned his head quickly toward the sound. Ray stood at the window, seeming to look where the owl had called from, and he stayed there for a very long time while he thought. Finally he turned back to them, after a good many things must have passed before his eyes. His face wasn’t hard or vindictive. It was sad.

“I’ve made my decision, although I’m not happy with it,” he said to Lindsey, and he looked at Gerard and Frank, taking them into his decision as well. “You have guns. We have bullets if you need them. I’ll stand aside when he comes, we all will.” Ray glanced at Bob. “I’ll let you do what you want, and I promise you, he’ll find no sanctuary here. It’s not what I want, but I think you’re right. I’m ashamed to say it, but I don’t believe the law would bring you any justice.”

Lindsey looked down, letting out her breath, letting her shoulders fall heavily.

“Thank you, sir,” she said quietly. “You let me speak, and you heard what I said.” She stood to leave the room. Gerard and Frank rose and followed her.

Outside, clouds rose in the sky, covering more and more of it. But for a moment, the air was suffused with the thick, golden afternoon sunlight of summer hastening toward autumn.

 

#### Frank’s Story

They meandered over the grounds again, saying little, Gerard and Frank heavy with the story Lindsey had told, and Lindsey worn from the telling. Gerard felt the bad things they’d both spoken of standing very near at hand. He felt a mix of concern and guilt—that they had weathered so much and that he seemed to have done so little. But there was something else too. The space between them seemed quiet with a feeling of unspoken trust, the way a drive crew came to feel after they’d weathered the first bad rainstorm together. For now, he could feel how they had somehow turned toward each other in a gentler way.

Gerard worried for both of them. The things he had heard them say—Frank waiting among the preacher man’s goons to do evil things against his will, Lindsey witnessing cruel things perpetrated on those around her and forgetting them, again and again. It had been horrible to hear them say it, but now he knew. Now they all knew, at least some, about what had happened. Knowing was better.

There were still some groups of longhorns standing on the wide range beyond them, nearer the river. Frank leaned his arms on the corral fence and looked out over the field.

“If he drives em, they must go all the way to Denver,” he said idly.

Gerard nodded. “Goodnight-Loving Trail.” Then he clapped his hand to his forehead. “Hell, I didn’t even think. It must be right out here to the west. We would of hit it if we kept going, before we … you know, made it to Mexico by accident or anything,” he said, frowning, thinking of his conversation with Bob on the road to Socorro.

“Hell of ways, up to Colorado,” Frank said conversationally, like he was trying to turn their talk to something easy. “It’s the slowest way to travel, when you got a couple thousand head of cattle with you. It feels like you got all the time in the world. That’s how we met, did you know?” Frank turned to Lindsey, to draw her in to the conversation. “Cowboying. Chisholm Trial, from San Antonio to Abilene. I was on my second drive up from south Texas, and this one here joined the Bar N crew when we was just three days out of San Antonio, with two months ahead of us. Trail boss picked him up from somewhere after Jackson had broke his leg, which was just some damn bad luck.

Frank gave Gerard a little smile. “I was angry at first when I saw this new fellow. I thought maybe I was gonna get moved up from riding drag, somewhere more forward that didn’t eat dust all day, but the trail boss put him right on swing where Jackson had been riding. No one knew him and we figured him for a tenderfoot, but after I saw him on that big black horse a time or two, it was pretty clear he could ride.”

Lindsey came and leaned at the fence next to him. She was listening. 

“Wasn’t too long before it was me and him on the night watch together,” Frank went on, “Although the first time, I didn’t even know it was him. At night, it’s just someone out there across from you.

That first night was dark and quiet—sky full of stars, and the cattle grumbling among themselves, shifting their feet and sighing. And across the herd, I hear this sound, this eerie whistling. I know it’s the other rider, I can see him over there at the opposite edge of the herd. We were driving about three thousand head, so it was a long ways across from me to him.

So I listen to him whistle, following his tune as it floats across. Then after a while, I whistle it back to him. Then he whistles back to me. We kept on like this, all the way around the herd. About an hour later, I finally see him coming around, and he touches his hat to me in the dark. We go by, I don’t say nothing, and we start in our opposite circles again around the herd.

Soon enough he sings out, a quiet, floating song in the night. It gave me goosebumps. It was like we were the only two people in the world, that night, us and that sea of sleepy cows.

Well, after I listened for a bit to that, I heard enough of the song that I could sing it back to him. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, so I made up words for a while, and after that, I just sang notes and calls. Cows didn’t mind any, of course. They were used to cowboys talking nonsense to them. We only passed each other twice in a two hour watch that night, and the cows spread away from us, almost over the horizon.

“Yeah,” Lindsey said. “I heard him sing a song or two while we was on the road.”

“He does that.” Frank smiled.

Gerard listened to them but didn’t say anything. Something in how they were talking about him made his cheeks flush warmly.

Frank went on. “You know, at Abilene, when the herd was near the rail yard, I seen him do the damndest thing. The cattle were getting restless, because of all the noise—the people and the trains. A train was set to come. The tracks were nearby and we could them humming; we were getting a little scared of what the cattle might do.

So Gerard sits himself up on the fence, his back facing right next to the tracks, and he starts singing to em.

I’m watching, and I can see how all their ears prick up right away and turn toward his voice. He starts singing and keeps on as the train gets closer and closer—cow songs, trail songs, night songs, any song he can think of—and their ears stay on him, I can see some of them glancing their eyes over to where he’s sitting on the fence. And they start to calm, because they’re listening. They stand there listening to him sing, and he keeps it up. Soon the train is lumbering by them, the rail so close and noisy that we have to shout to each other to be heard over it, and Gerard must be getting cinder burns on his shirt, he’s so close. But those cows stay calm, like they can’t even bother about the train as long as they hear the sound of his voice.

“Anyway,” Frank said lightly, turning to Lindsey, “That’s how I know cows are creatures of discernment and good taste. That’s why I don’t eat em no more—well, that and a million other things I seen em do.”

Then he looked away a little and said in a quieter voice, “I think I must of dreamed about that when we were … riding. After Black Mesa, in all that mess. That whole time, I thought I could hear Gerard still singing to those damn cows.”

Tears sprang in Gerard’s eyes. “Oh, Frank,” he said, his voice thick. He put his arms around Frank’s shoulders and held him tight. Frank leaned into him, patted Gerard’s arm where it reached across his chest. They stood like that a while.

Lindsey gave them a glance and turned back to looking at the river and the longhorns. She didn’t move from where she stood at the fence, on Frank’s other side as he leaned against Gerard. Gerard felt suddenly certain of her ability to take all of this in. Like he had felt crying in front of her after Dodge City—with everything she had seen already, she didn’t seem too inclined to worry. Eventually, Gerard loosened his hold on Frank and they stood apart a bit. Gerard turned toward the field and looked out over it too, letting his shoulder lean softly against Frank’s as they stood.

When the emotion had ebbed away a little, and they all had breathed in the quiet of the desert air for a while, Frank turned to Lindsey.

“I heard your voice, didn’t I?” he asked her. “During that mess. I couldn’t understand why I would hear a lady’s voice, but that was you, wasn’t it?”

Lindsey nodded. “It was.”

“I still feel confused sometimes,” Frank said. “Even now, here, I got so many things mixed up in my head. All those damn church songs. His voice and the things he told us. I can’t hardly think straight.” Frank put his hand on his forehead and pressed against it. “It’s all still … kind of stuck in there.”

“Yeah,” Lindsey said slowly. “It can be like that.”

Frank turned to her, frowning deeply, grasping at her words. “You think it can?” he asked.

“I know it can,” she said.

He squeezed his eyes shut, as though trying to clear his vision. “That was the thing,” he said, his voice strained. “When I was with those men, the things we did—that I did. It was like I didn’t have a choice—inside my own self, I just didn’t. I watched it all, but I didn’t have a choice, and I don’t know why. I wanted to get away, but I couldn’t.”

Lindsey studied him and Gerard could see how her eyes went to the old bruise marks fading on Frank’s neck and jaw. “I mean, you tried some, though, didn’t you,” she said. Frank looked away miserably.

“They always stopped me,” he said. “He coulda made us fight like dogs if he wanted to.”

“What did he ever want with you?” Gerard asked. “What could a man like that possibly want with us?”

Lindsey shrugged sadly. “Some people just collect things, the way little boys keep beetles in match boxes. Surely you seen that. And sometimes, some little boys pull the legs off em, not caring who or what they hurt.”

“Those other men, they came from somewhere, too,” she said. “They had parents or wives or families that they left when he took em away.” Gerard felt sick hearing that, thinking of the two men dead on the mesa. Lindsey went on. “Ain’t no better explanation than he’s an evil man who has evil gifts. And here we all are, somehow come to be part of it. It’s our own bad luck and nothing more.”

 

Later, Bob ventured out and joined them outside, taking his place beside them at the fenceline. He seemed to sense the introspective mood among them and stood quietly for a while.

Eventually, he said to Lindsey, “You done good today. I would of never thought to hear that out of him—that he’d stand aside for you all.”

He looked toward the field and the river. “It’s a good place here,” he said, “And that’s why Ray’s so protective of it. That’s why he don’t want it all wild and lawless like so many other places out here.”

“But it’s bigger than just him. It’s the feel of the river and the ranch, the way it sits by the mountains. Good things happen here. I don’t necessarily know why.”

“You know, it’s the desert. A lot of times here, we need rain and need it bad. I seen thunderstorms break over this valley, spitting rain so hard it makes the dust jump, coming right when we need it most. But the rain stops right at the edge of his land, right at the river, or the road.” Bob held out his arm, measuring a long straight line to the river. “On one side dry. On his side, rain. So when he says he means to take care of this place, when he says he means to decide how it goes here, I believe him—I believe he has the power to do that.”

“I hope you’re right,” Lindsey said. “I think we’re in need of every good thing we can find.”

The sun was nearing the western horizon. For a brief moment, everything turned a bright, impossible gold in its light. Then blue stormclouds were rolling toward it, choking the sunlight in the sky. The colors clashed and the breeze picked up sharply around them. The comforting words Bob had said had scattered in the wind.

Lindsey scanned roiling the sky. “He’s coming,” she said. “He’ll be here soon.”

 

#### The Long Night Before the Last Fight

Supper was an anxious affair. They ate their food cold, bunched together at one end of a table in the big room. People filed in and out all evening, waiting to speak to Ray or receive instructions from him. Gerard could hear, listening to more and more conversations as he oiled his rifle, how Ray directed the people of Socorro—the father who came down carrying his four-year-old son was told to keep his family inside til sundown the next night, unless someone came by and told him different. The young woman with her father’s rifle who lived by the main road was told to watch from moonrise til midnight and report anything she saw. Some grumbled to Ray about the trouble and the caution and cast their eyes over at where Gerard, Frank, and Lindsey sat. In the middle of the evening, Bob walked over to their huddled little group. He stood by Frank, who looked up at him. They all looked among each other, failing to speak for nerves. Then Bob reached into his jacket and took out a pistol, setting it on the table in front of Frank. “I noticed you ain’t got no gun. Pistol holster on your hip, but ain’t got nothing in it.” He cleared his throat awkwardly. “I know what Ray said, stand aside and all that, but that man you talked about, he don’t sound too good to me. So. There you go.”

Frank watched Bob go, back to the kitchen and the conversations with Ray and the townspeople. He picked up the pistol and hefted it in his hand. His face changed a little, some of the anxiousness softening away.

When the people had mostly cleared out, Bob walked them to the summer house, a building on the other side of the barn that was mostly sleeping quarters for the farm and ranch hands during the summer. He pushed open the door into a large room with beds and bunks and cots of all sorts pushed up against every wall. It looked like it could sleep about a dozen if the beds were full. They walked inside and the sound of their footsteps echoed cavernously.

Bob surveyed the room and pointed out the wardrobe where blankets were. “There’s plenty of room here, and it’ll give you a little distance from the main house. Anyone in town’ll point someone to the ranch house first thing, and, well, you know what they say about eggs and baskets.”

Gerard exchanged a worried glance with Frank and Lindsey.

“You should sleep if you can,” Bob said. “We have a watch set til dawn. But,” he said, frowning heavily, “If you hear gunshots in the night, I expect you’ll want to rouse yourselves pretty quickly. Hard to say how quick this thing’ll happen.” Then Bob left them and went back up to the ranch house.

“Sleep,” Frank said, and gave a humorless chuckle. 

They arranged themselves in the room as though they were lying in wait for an ambush instead of bedding down for the night, though Gerard didn’t realize it until after they had . He and Frank were on the only bed big enough for two, inside the door immediately as it opened, and Lindsey was on a cot under the largest window. They turned out the lamp without saying anything to each other.

The moon, dark gold and rising slow, hung huge on the horizon. But all the light that came in the windows was a sickly pale blue. The floorboards creaked unnaturally, like an army of ghosts walked on them. Lying in the dark, Gerard thought of his parents, his father’s store, the buildings in the east, his younger brother. Frank turned awkwardly next to him, and Gerard could tell by his breathing that he wasn’t asleep. He thought about the awful things that had happened to Frank that Frank hadn’t yet told him about. In the dark of that night, Gerard was no longer certain he wanted to know about them, that he wanted to understand. He felt his own cowardice creeping back, felt gripped by the mindless, paralyzed fear that had kept him motionless for so long in Abilene. He stretched out again on the bed, trying to undo the way his fear pulled him into a miserable ball.  He tried to breathe, tried to slow his pounding heart.

 

#### Lindsey and the Lady

Lindsey lay in the darkness listening to Gerard and Frank toss and grumble on the big bed. She let her mind go to quiet things—the slow, muddy river nearby, a horse paddock at night, the sound of the moon. When they were quiet and she could hear that their breathing had calmed, she carried her boots outside and pulled them on quietly at the edge of the porch. She walked into the night.

The moon arced high above the valley, and it was not so eerily large now that it was higher in the sky. She walked up toward town, toward the mission and the graveyard. Her boots crunched in the gravel and dirt of the road. She heard an owl call from somewhere in the trees and then saw its silent shape glide over her. At the graveyard’s low fence, the night breeze roused itself and she caught the impossibly sweet smell of honeysuckle, of summer flowers. 

She turned and started, her eye believing it had seen a tall white figure standing next to the building. When she looked again, she saw it was the leafy vine growing up one side and onto the roof, massed with leaves. The tight buds covering it during the day had thrown themselves wide in the night, and the building was covered in a cascade of white flowers. The smell was coming from them. Behind the flowers, in cracks in the building’s rude walls, Lindsey could still see dim hints of flickering light, the candles in the glasses burning at the altar.

She stood by herself at the fence, looking over the graveyard.

Then a woman was standing beside her, between her and the white flowers. Lindsey opened her eyes to the woman, taking in her dark, flowing hair, her shadowy robes, and her white, white skin, whiter than the flowers, whiter than bones. Her eyes looked very large, bottomless in her beautiful face. Lindsey stared. Around them, the night was very quiet.

_It’s good that you came._ The woman smiled. She had spoken, but Lindsey couldn’t tell if she had heard the words in her ears or not.

_I have something for you._ The woman held up her closed fingers. _Put out your hand._

Lindsey put out her hand. The woman extended her own hand over it. Her fingers were long and bony. The sleeve of her long, black robe brushed against Lindsey’s hand. The woman dropped something small and cold into Lindsey’s palm. Lindsey turned her hand to look.

It was a .45 bullet, with a blunt silver nose and a black casing. In the moonlight, the dark casing seemed to swim with silver moonlight. Lindsey looked from her palm to the woman’s face.

“Are you helping me?” she asked.

_Oh, yes._ The woman nodded. _I want the thing you want. It’s the revenge you both deserve._

Lindsey let the bullet roll on her palm. “What do I need to—what do I owe you for this?” she asked.

_Nothing. It’s a gift._ She smiled such a sweet, sad smile. _You’ve already given me so much. Whether you wanted it or not, I’ve already taken so many precious things from you._

In the moonlight, the woman’s face was liquid and confusing. For a moment, the lady was the image of her sister, eyes bright and childish, full of life. It was such a likeness that Lindsey gasped with longing. Next, the face was her mother, kind and strong, a woman who hadn’t yet lost the strength to care for her life. In a final dizzying second, Lindsey recognized herself in the woman’s face, young and sad, still tender enough to cry. When had that been? she thought. How long ago?

Lindsey looked away from her. “I’m a monster now, that’s what I’ve become,” she said softly. “I’ll kill him and I won’t shed a tear.”

She and the lady stood for a time in the darkness, amid the sweet smell of the flowers.

_Maybe not tomorrow_ , the lady said. _But someday you will. You’ll cry again, you’ll laugh again. You’ll find your way back to everything. And those boys: don’t worry. You don’t have to choose._

_And one day, I’ll see you again. Not for a time. But when you see me, you’ll remember this night._ Lindsey turned to the woman and was surprised at how clearly her skull showed through her pale, translucent skin. It was as though she didn’t have skin at all.

Then, after a time, Lindsey was standing by herself again, looking over graveyard. The bullet was warm and solid in her hand. She turned away from the mission and walked back up to Ray’s summer house.

 

Gerard stirred when she opened the door of the summer house.

“Hey, now,” he murmured sleepily to Lindsey. “You still up? We saw you went outside.”

“Couldn’t sleep,” she whispered back, shutting the door carefully behind her. “You neither, I see.”

Gerard raised himself on one arm, moving carefully to avoid jostling Frank too much behind him.

“Here,” he said, and pulled the covers back. “Come lay down here. Maybe you’ll sleep better.”

Lindsey sat down on the bed and then stretched out next to him. Beside her, Gerard was warm with sleep, no matter how restless he claimed to be. He pulled the covers over her.

“You’re cold,” he said. “You shouldn’t get cold.” It was the kind of single-minded concern that gripped a person when they were mostly asleep. He put his arm over her.

“Not that cold,” she said softly, although she sensed he was already falling back to sleep. She turned her head toward him, settling under his heavy arm.

He opened his eyes again and looked at her. Their faces were very close. He brought his hand up and smoothed her hair.

She kissed him, and he kissed back, his mouth sleepy and gentle. When they pulled apart, he smiled at her.

“You silly boy,” Lindsey said. Her voice was fond. “Go to sleep now.”

Gerard smiled and shut his eyes again.

She settled into the sound of his and Frank’s slow breathing. She thought on what the lady had said, turning it over in her mind. She didn’t have to choose. Or, put another way, she could choose them both—if they would be chosen. Gerard and his precious, naive earnestness. Frank and his tender sensibilities, how he easily he found a sweet story to tell them despite the cruel things they’d all been through.

And how they cared for each other—undeniably, that was part of it, too. Lindsey had seen it already, even if somehow she hadn’t been listening to Gerard’s songs—how Gerard had thrown his arms around Frank after Frank’s story, the familiar way he put his hands on him, day after day, after they rescued him at Black Mesa. She saw how they existed together, already yoked tight like an oxen pair.  She hadn’t seen it before, two men like that, and so she didn’t know what name to give it. She would ponder it a long time, thinking how to say it to them, but she knew already in a deep part of herself that she found the two of them together as lithe and beautiful as yearling colts.

She dropped to sleep with Gerard and Frank quiet beside her, and that pleasant thought in her mind.

 

Lindsey woke early, when the sky was still dark. For a moment, she thought she hadn’t slept, and it was still the middle of the night, wearing on impossibly long. But the moon had moved. It had fallen toward the western horizon, and she knew time was passing, that the sun would be up soon. It was a relief. She slid carefully from under Gerard’s arm and gathered up her boots and hat. She put the holster belt with the bullets and pistol around her waist, and went outside to walk up to the ranch house. She felt in her pocket as she walked. The lady’s bullet was still there and seemed solid enough.

In the long room with the fireplace, Ray was already awake and moving unhurriedly in the kitchen. A coffeepot was on the fire and he was cutting up yesterday’s cornbread. He looked up at Lindsey as she entered. “We’ll get Bob to make some biscuits when he’s back,” he said by way of a greeting.

“Back from where?”

“Last watch. Up at the edge of town. Should be less than an hour. Night’s been quiet.”

Lindsey leaned on the table and watched him. He cut the cornbread into rough chunks and put it in bowls. He sprinkled sugar on it from a paper sack.

“I saw someone last night,” she said. “By the graveyard.”

Ray’s hands slowed and he held the paper sack, fingering its edge. “Hmm. That so?” he said. 

“It was a lady,” Lindsey said and folded her arms, watching Ray’s face, waiting for what he would say and whether he would believe her.

Ray nodded slowly. “People see her sometimes.”

Lindsey thought of how the woman had been there and then hadn’t. “Is she a ghost?” she asked.

“Not a ghost,” Ray shook his head. “I wouldn’t say that.”

There was the mission and the tall cross in its yard. The altar with its candles and icons.  “Is she the Virgin Mary?” Lindsey asked. 

“Well,” Ray said, and his eyes searched somewhere far away for a moment. “Yes and no.”

“Her skin was very white.” Lindsey frowned, remembering how she could see the skull through the lady’s skin when she turned her head. “Like bleached bone in the sun.”

“Some people call her La Hermana Blanca,” Ray offered. “It means the White Sister. That’s not her only name, of course. Some people call her Santa Muerte. It means Holy Death.”

Lindsey listened to the knowing way Ray talked about her. “You’ve seen her,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Not often, but yes. She lives here. Well, not only here, of course—she lives many places. Everywhere the owl can fly. The owls—they’re hers.”

Lindsey remembered the owl that had called when they were sitting in the room talking, how Ray had seemed to listen to it. She stood at the counter, and Ray started with bowls again, pouring milk from a tin over the cornbread.

“When you see her, is she really there?” Lindsey asked.

Ray waited and looked at his hands, at the bowls. “I believe that she is,” he said finally.

“She gave me this.” She took the bullet from her pocket. It was smooth and black on her palm as she held it out to Ray. “She said it was a gift.”

Ray put his hand under hers and brought the bullet closer to examine it, then let go. He didn’t touch it. “It fit your gun?” he asked.

Lindsey nodded.

“She’s certainly known to give gifts,” Ray said. “Sometimes things you want, sometimes not.”

Lindsey put the bullet back into her pocket. 

“It’s funny,” he said. “Living here for as long as I have. I get it in my head that I know the best way to protect what’s good here, that I gotta take some big stand about something. Or maybe that I’ll stay out of it, and keep my hands clean.” He nodded, but more to himself than to her, she thought.

“She pulls me up short, sometimes,” he said. “She reminds me of what’s right, instead of letting me stay caught up in my own concerns.”

Ray set a bowl of the cornbread in front of her.

“You don’t owe her anything,” he said, “But when this is all done, maybe leave her something anyway. At the altar. Something to show your appreciation, if it turns out she helped you any.”

Lindsey took the bowl and sat down at a table with her back leaned to the warmth of the fire.

 

Frank came in the kitchen room next. Lindsey was still drinking coffee, her feet turned toward the fire. Frank helped himself to some coffee and settled beside her on the bench.

“Who was that with you?” he asked, after they had sat for a time. “In the night, when you went outside. I thought there was a lady standing next to you.”

“I thought you were asleep when I went out,” Lindsey said.

Frank chuckled and shifted on the bench. He shrugged. “I may have been. But we were looking out the window, both of us. Wondered were you had got to. But then we saw you, going up that road.”

“And you saw her?”

“Well,” Frank said slowly. “I did. Gerard didn’t seem to.” He looked into his coffee cup for a bit. “He’s still very young. There’s some things he ain’t really seen yet, if you take my meaning. But it ain’t bad—to be that way.”

“No,” Lindsey said. “No, it ain’t. We should all be that lucky.”

Ray had sat down at the table with a cup of coffee, behind them, overhearing their words. Now, he looked between them. Frank didn’t ask any more about the woman.

Lindsey thought of something else in the day ahead. She put her elbows on her knees and frowned hard.

“Frank, I gotta ask you,” she said, looking at the floor, squeezing her coffee cup in her hands. “If anything happens to me today, if there’s a reason … if for some reason I can’t take a shot. At him. If I can’t, you’ll do it, right?”

Frank nodded his head and kept on nodding.

“Girl, I will,” he said. “I seen him and I know him. You trust me, I’ll take that shot.”

 

#### The Preacher Man Comes to Socorro

It was midmorning when they got word that there were six men on horses riding on the river road, south from Albuquerque. They wore black hats, to a man, and carried their guns out.

“How long we got?” Ray asked the girl who had come to report it.

“Half hour,” the girl said. She shifted her father’s shotgun in her hands. “If they stay on the road. But they don’t know no other way, and they’re not … scared at all. They’re just riding in the open. They all got guns. Two rifles, four pistols. The one in the black coat has something shiny with pearl handles.”

“Thank you, gaucha,” Ray said to her and touched her shoulder briefly. “Now I want you to go home and stay out of this. Stay safe. Keep off the road.”  The girl nodded and left them.

Frank had an ugly look on his face. “That bastard,” he growled. “My gun.”

Gerard squeezed his shoulder hard, and they all stood up.

They walked up to the wide town square and stood at its southern edge. Clear sunlight shone over everything. The mission stood tall on the western side and the sun glinted warmly off the bells in their towers.

Gerard looked up the road, and there was nothing yet, no sound or sign of movement that he could make out. Lindsey and Frank stood nervously near, shifting their weight on their feet and fingering their pistols in their holsters, looking up the road. Ray and Bob stood a little away, planting themselves firmly at the sidelines. Bob had his shotgun and Ray had a revolver in his belt. He hadn’t touched it. Bob had been scowling since breakfast, no doubt still bristling under Ray’s edict that they would stand aside. From his grumbling that morning, Gerard thought Bob seemed ready to take a shot at the preacher man himself.

Then, they heard men’s voices and the jingling of horse tack, the sound of hoofbeats. The road turned a wide corner north of the square, and, around it, men on horseback came into view.

They saw the goons first, the men whose images had been burned in Gerard’s mind’s eye since Abilene and the dream that wasn’t a dream. The two carrying rifles had them out and resting across their laps. The men with pistols wore them brazenly belted outside of their coats. The men had on the neat, expensive hats like the unnatural hat Frank had worn in Dodge City. Behind them, at the end of the group, was the preacher man. He rode a tall horse, a blood bay that shone darkly red in the sunshine. Pansy was a white gleam at his waist. Seeing the man again was a heavy weight in Gerard’s gut. He could only imagine how much worse it was for Frank, and worst of all for Lindsey. He felt sympathy for why she had faltered in Dodge City. How could you face your own father, no matter how terrible a man, with the intent to kill him? But, on the other side, if a man had done you such wrong, and you had been powerless against him, how could you face him again at all?

The horses were moving quickly, but the men seemed jovial. Laughing and calling to one another, they might have been a group of friends on a pleasant journey or fraternal band of outlaws. Apparently the preacher man didn’t have to give orders all the time—or, at least, not to all men. It was disconcerting to hear the friendly way they laughed together.

Gerard stood on Lindsey’s right side, and Frank was on her left. The horses jogged into the square and Lindsey walked forward, a lone figure set apart from the rest of them. She wore her black vest and hat, and the red kerchief tied at her neck. Gerard looked at the silhouette lines of her back and it pained him to see her. He thought how fiercely he wanted to protect her from all of this. Yet here she was standing before them all, proud and straight as any man, and he was beside her, hardly able to keep his rifle from sliding in his sweating hands. He understood the idea of him protecting her was a fantasy, but in those moments, watching the men cross the square and pull their horses up before her, his heart wished for it anyway, and hurt for the wishing.

The preacher man cast his eyes over her, as Gerard had seen him do before, and his face was a parent disgusted by a child’s unforgivable foolishness. But his words were smooth and relaxed. The goons stopped in front of Lindsey and parted to either side. The preacher man spoke from the back of the group, as though the men were part of his audience and he intended to confuse and mock her before them.

“Quiet place you’re hiding,” he said, looking down at her from the back of the blood bay. “Nice little town. Full of well behaved townsfolk, I’d wager. We ain’t seen one face as we rode in.” The men sniggered and exchanged glances. “Type of place we like,” he said, looking conspiratorially at his goons. 

“You shouldn’t of come.” She spoke loudly, her voice carrying over the square, and it shimmered into an ultimatum around them.

“Girl, I knew we’d find you easy,” he said, and his tone was scornful. He sidestepped her words like a tricky horse, trying to point her away from what she’d said. “I knew we’d come straight on you if we just kept following the road south. It’s like you ain’t even gone nowhere.”

Lindsey refused to be pointed. “I ain’t yours to find,” she said. “Not anymore. You missed your chance for that a long time ago.”

“It was you came looking for me, don’t forget that.” He changed tack, chastising her quickly and directly. “You started all this. But I’m ready to be done with it. I can’t keep running into you all over the god damned territories, never knowing where you’ll turn up next.”

“I told you at the beginning, I came looking for you because you owe me something,” Lindsey said. “You still do. You owe me plenty, and I aim to get it from you.” Her voice was weighty and there seemed to be a spine and a strength in her straight words compared to his curving, twisting ones.

“Well,” he said, and gave a little laugh. “As it happens, I don’t aim that you’ll have anything from me—not anything at all. I washed my hands of you years ago.”

Lindsey nodded slowly. “I thought as much,” she said, and waited.

“Well,” the preacher man said, “If we don’t have any more to say to each other, this’ll be over today.” He looked pointedly at the goon in the front of the group, closest to Lindsey. The man had a rifle across his lap.

“Do it,” he said, matter of factly, with a jerk of his chin toward Lindsey. “Take care of her.”

All expression fell from the man’s face as he looked down at Lindsey, and then a dawning horror began to bleed across it. His hands moved around his rifle, but didn’t lift it from his lap. Lindsey stiffened as his hands moved and her hand twitched next to the holster at her hip. Gerard could see Ray and Bob’s faces, alight with dismay, as they understood what the preacher man had ordered. 

The man looked to the preacher man, terrified. “No,” he said, “No. You can’t mean—” He shook his head, but barely, hardly moving. His eyes scanned the other men, looking them to have some sympathy with him, pleading for them to back him up. “She’s just a girl,” he said to them. 

“I said, do it!” the preacher man screamed, and the horses skipped and tossed their heads, frightened by his voice. Lindsey fell back a step. There was horror on her face that wasn’t a fear of the goon, or of the gun that he still hadn’t raised from his lap. Sweat stood on the man’s face, and he was shaking. Gerard wondered what force the man must be exerting inside himself to refuse one of the preacher man’s direct orders.

The preacher man reined his horse in sharply and took a fierce, measured breath. His nostrils flared. “Help him,” he said to the other goons, and his voice was stiff and controlled again.

Around him, four men turned and raised their guns slowly, pointing them at the man who had yet to raise his weapon. Gerard felt his stomach twist, full of fear and disgust at the panorama playing out before them. The man made a small, unconscious sound. Gerard could see the ugly struggle on his face. His wide eyes circled the goons once, staring into the muzzles of the guns around him. He picked up the rifle from his lap.

Gerard pulled his rifle to his shoulder, and even before that, Lindsey and Frank had both drawn and fired. There was a confusion of gunshots and movement, shouting and startled horses. The man tumbled backwards off his horse before his rifle was fully raised, taking a shot to the shoulder that knocked him back. Gerard shot twice into the fray, aiming for one of the goons nearest him, and shook the spent shells from his rifle, quickly shoving new ones in.

The goons wheeled and turned their weapons on the five of them on the ground. Bullets flew and gunpowder was in the air. It was impossible to tell where shots were coming from. Bob had raised his shotgun and fired at one of the goons. Lindsey had her arm out and her eye in her pistol’s sight, the same calm sighting he’d seen on Black Mesa. Frank shot from his waist, left hand hovering at the pistol’s hammer, faster than all of them.

When he’d reloaded, Gerard aimed carefully and shot again, this time with a bullet that seemed to find its mark. He grimaced. It was an ugly shot in the neck, but the goon toppled to the ground.

The goons were on the ground, and their horses had scattered away. Only the preacher man remained on his horse’s back. From his position at the back of the group, it seemed he had been relatively protected. He had Pansy in his hand and a breathless look on his face, but Gerard couldn’t tell if he had taken a shot. Hell, he didn’t know if the man could shoot, or if he relied on his goons to do it for him.

Frank stepped forward and Gerard could see him quickly take in the clear line to the man on horseback. Then there was the sound of another shot, and Frank was lowering his pistol. The preacher man seemed to take Frank’s shot in the stomach. He doubled over, losing his balance in the saddle. The blood bay shook him off and he fell to the ground. Pansy tumbled away, out of the man’s hand.

Gerard looked to Frank, who looked satisfied, and then to Lindsey, whose face betrayed nothing. After a second, they started toward the man’s body.

“Wait,” Ray called, and everyone stopped. He was watching the preacher man’s form in the dirt.

Gerard turned from Ray back to the fallen figure. It began to move. As they watched, the man got to his knees and then to his feet. He stood up straight before them and, with a pointed glance at Frank, shook out his black coat. Something fell out of its folds, dropping into the dust at his feet. Gerard was sickly certain it was the bullet from Frank’s pistol. The coat was unmarked. There was no blood anywhere.

The preacher man looked at them and adjusted his black hat. He turned to Frank. “You disgusting little rat,” he said. “Always were a good shot.”

Frank cocked back the hammer again.

“Although,” the preacher man said in a silky, slippery voice, “Instead of coming out here and acting the hero, all bent on saving the lady and making things right, you oughtta think on the things you already done.” He shook his head sadly at Frank. “All those things,” he said ominously. “I asked you to do them, and you did them. They’ll never go away.”

Gerard could see how the man needled him, saying what that would touch Frank where he was hurt, anything to force him from his course. Gerard thought of what the man had said, how it was his gift to control people, as easily as leading a bull by the ring in its nose.

“You always controverted me, at every turn,” the preacher man said. “But now—” He looked Frank full in the face. “Now, you’re starting to believe now, aren’t you? You know what you done. How you’ll be judged for it. You can feel it.”

Frank had stopped. The pistol trembled in his hand.

“Now, get that gun off me,” the man snapped.

Frank bent his arms and slowly pulled the pistol up, away from the man, to his shoulder. He kept his eyes on the preacher man and didn’t seem able to move any further.

The man watched Frank for a moment, seeing his stillness, and then turned triumphantly on Lindsey.

“And you,” he said. “You’re angry? Angry that you got hurt, or they got hurt. People died. It happens every day out here.” The man made a careless gesture that encompassed the whole of the wide world around them. “You think what happened to you—what happened to us—makes you special? Trust me, girl, you ain’t got nothing to cry about and ain’t none of it special at all.”

Lindsey looked at him, listening. In the space where he seemed to wait for her to respond, she tipped her pistol and pulled back the rod, spitting the spent brass casings into her hand. She held her fist out and let them drop them onto the ground between them. Then she reached to her belt and a strange black bullet was in her hand. Gerard frowned. It was hard to see and seemed to swim in her hand. She slid it into a chamber and snapped the gate shut. She turned the cylinder carefully, positioning it. The man saw the bullet and something about it seemed to hold him in place.

“What you got there, girl?” he said in a low voice. “What is that?” His speech was suddenly plain as he looked intently at her gun. Lindsey lifted it in her hands.

“You ain’t,” he growled deeply. “You ain’t gonna do this. I forbid it.” He fell back from her a half-step.

Lindsey took a deep breath and trained the gun on him.

“Pray,” she said, her voice cold. The square was silent. The man’s eyes were on the gun in her hands, and then, with a growing understanding, on her face. He took another step back, his hands weakly in front of him in supplication.

“What, all your talking, and you don’t got anything to say now?” she said. She took a step closer with the gun. “I want to hear you pray. I want you to pray for my mother.”

Gerard looked and two women seemed to stand behind her, one older and one younger. The younger one had Lindsey’s shiny black hair. Their eyes were on the man, faces cold and solemn, but intent. They were stood behind Lindsey and they were three together, like the trees in Holly, looking at the man before them. There was honest fear written on the man’s face now, and his eyes seemed to jump away from Lindsey and widen even more. Gerard wondered if he could see them standing together, if he could see that they accused him now.

“Pray for my sister,” Lindsey said to him. “Pray for me.”

She cocked the hammer back. It was a cold, sharp sound. Her hands were steady. The man didn’t move.

“Pray for your own soul, you monster,” she said.

A very loud sound split the air. Gerard winced back. He could see it on the others’ faces, how Ray and Bob turned away from the sound. Frank had thrown his arm in front of his face, but then he was able to lower his hands from where they had been frozen.

The preacher man sank slowly to his knees, as though he was heeding Lindsey’s advice, as though he had perhaps decided to pray. A drop of blood ran from the dark hole in his brow down over his cheek and hovered at the edge of his mouth like a tear. He wavered for a moment, and there was a surprised, blissful look on his face, as though he was, at last, in the grip of some truly holy rapture. His body slumped sideways into the dirt. His hat was knocked from his head, and Gerard could see his black hair shiny with blood.

Lindsey lowered the gun and stood, looking at his body on the ground. The women looked at the body, too. Then the mother reached out and put her on the girl’s shoulder, and they turned, disappearing away to another place.

As they went, Lindsey turned quickly, as though she had seen the movement out of the corner of her eye. She took a deep, ragged breath and let her hands part from where they had been clasped before her, around her pistol. The gun hung loosely in one hand.

Gerard laid his rifle on the ground and went quickly to her. She looked at him, her dark eyes empty and searching. Then her eyes roved back over the man’s body, over the blood that was on the ground in a growing puddle. She looked with confusion at the gun in her hand.

“My whole family, now,” she said, with a quick shake of her head. She glanced around, troubled, flustered, as though she had misplaced something small, a penny or a dime. Her eyes fell on the man, and she seemed startled again, but with growing sadness. “We’re all dead now,” she said.

Gerard puts his hand firmly on hers. Her hand went limp after a moment and the pistol was in his hand. He quickly slid it in his belt and breathed a relieved breath. He hadn’t been certain it would happen as easily as that.

“Okay, now,” he said to her. “Let’s go away from here.”

He put his arm around her shoulders and turned her heavily away from the square and the bodies. Around him, Bob and Ray were moving toward Frank, who looked dazedly around. At the edges of the square, Gerard could see shutters moving and doors opening, as people slowly understood that the danger Ray had warned them of was over.

Lindsey turned from him again to look back toward the man’s black-clad body in the sun. Impatient concern was on her face. Ghosts and tears stood in her eyes. Gerard imagined they would stay there for some time.

“Easy there,” he murmured to her. “You’re okay. Let’s just go.”

 

#### Burying the Man

Afterward, Bob left Ray standing in the square over the preacher man’s body and went and hitched the mule to a cart. He brought it back and together, they lifted the man’s body into the open back and lay a blanket over it. The blood sank into the thirsty ground and left a dark mark in the dirt. People would walk around it in the square until snow fell.

Ray called other men to him, men with shovels and the mission priest, while Bob stood by the man’s body in the open cart. Ray arranged that the other dead men, the ones that used to belong to him, would be buried in unmarked plots in the cemetery beside the mission. Things being what they were, Ray declined to ask the priest about a place for the preacher man’s body. Quietly, he figured the other dead men would appreciate some distance from him in their eternal rest.

As it turned out, there were four of them. As Bob stood dispassionately over the five goons in the square, he saw that one turned his head up from where he lay on the ground.

“Please,” the man said in a weak voice. “Help me.”

Bob walked over and stared down at him, taking in the neat hole in his shoulder, the relative pallor of his face. It was the man who had been unwilling to raise his gun.

“Huh,” Bob said, looking at his shoulder, looking at the rest of him. “You’re glad that wasn’t shot, I suppose.”

When Ray was done with the mission priest, they helped the injured man to the cart. He staggered heavily against Ray for support and Ray gave it. Later than afternoon, a man from the village who had been a medic in the war between the states came and looked at him. The wounded man had a hole in his shoulder, but the bullet had gone straight through and didn’t seem to have hit anything else important. The medic bandaged him up, and he lay in a bed in the sick room. Frank and Lindsey and Gerard stayed away from that end of the house.

 

Frank had retrieved Pansy from the ground in the square and carried her gingerly back to the ranch house. He thought for a while about what to do with the gun, and then put her on the mantel in the kitchen room and left her there. It would be a long while before he picked her back up. Lindsey stalked through the house, restless and angry at everything, and unable to sit still. Frank and Gerard followed her and sat with her at different times, each trying to be of comfort, and each only succeeding a little.

Eventually she stood up from both of them as they sat at the table and walked back to the summer house by herself. She picked up the belt with the holster from where she had thrown it on the bed and opened the cylinder of her pistol. She shook the black casing from the lady’s bullet out into her hand. It was plain and blank now, dirty with powder. She rolled it on her palm thoughtfully.

In the barn, Bob was hammering together a coffin out of pine boards with his hammers and nails taken down from inside the blacksmith shop. When it was finished, he and Ray lifted the man’s body inside. Ray straightened his coat as best he could and folded his hands, pressing them together over his chest. Bob nailed the lid of the coffin into place. Then he and Bob went out to dig.

The afternoon sun sank and pulled long shadows from the bases of buildings, from the mission and its silent bells. The cross in the courtyard stood still while its shadow crawled up the mission’s walls and reached its arms into the graveyard.

While Bob and Ray were still digging, Lindsey slipped away and walked out alone to the rough little building beside the graveyard. Candles on the table flickered in glass cups. Ones from yesterday that had burned down had been replaced by new ones, set by other hands animated by other prayers. Melted wax stood in dirty piles on the table, pockmarked with soot and bits of burnt wick, between the icons of the White Sister.

Lindsey thought blankly for a bit about whether she should say a prayer, seeing as how she was leaving an offering after a fashion. But after thinking on it, she decided she didn’t know how. She took the black shell casing from her pocket and settled it in among a burning candle and dried flowers that had turned black and were sifting into dust. It would be what Ray had advised—a token of her appreciation.

 

When the grave was dug, Bob and Ray came back to the house, dust on their faces and dirt worked deep into their hands. Gerard and Frank stood with them at the corners of the coffin and helped lift it into the wagon. Then Gerard went to the summer house to bring Lindsey back and tell her it was time. They all rode together in the cart out to the place Ray had picked for the gravesite, down the less traveled side of the road, where the land began to rise away from the river. When they got there, Lindsey took off her hat and carried it in her hand. The dry wind blew wisps of her hair across her face and neck.

The four men struggled to lower the rough coffin into the grave with ropes. They buried the man with the Lady’s bullet in his head and a rude wooden marker above him.

                Hal Lindsey  
                God judge him  
                1840 - 1883

The first date was a guess, but near enough, Lindsey said. In the sun and wind, the marker wouldn’t last long.

Ray looked at Lindsey from across the open grave. “Do you want to say anything?” he asked.

“No, sir,” she said. “I ain’t got nothing to say.” She shook her head, lips pressed together.

“Fair enough,” Ray said and nodded. It was his final verdict, and he delivered it while they stood at the graveside with the dry wind at their backs. Then he squeezed Lindsey around the shoulders, and he and Bob walked away over the dust, back to the road to sit in the open back of the cart and to exchange gruff conversation with the mule.

 

The three of them stood in the stretching afternoon sun. Frank looked at the marker.

“Lindsey,” he said. “Huh. I never knew that was his name.”

Lindsey sighed and looked back across the valley. “I’d just as soon you thought of it as my name, rather than his,” she said. “I don’t belong to him and never did.”

They turned away from the grave and looked back at the river. Frank and Gerard stood on either side of her.

“Thing is,” she said, “I don’t want to end up like him.”

Gerard made a little, tender noise, like the thought of it pained and amazed him. “You’re not like him,” he said. 

“I can be,” she said. “I know I myself well enough to know that.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “I’ve got so much hate in me. I have to let some of it run out, but I don’t know how. He was an angry man, and I understand being angry, I do. I don’t understand nothing more than I do that.”

Soon, they walked back to the cart, to Bob and Ray and the mule and its soft face. Bob drove them all back to the ranch house.

 

#### Winter in Socorro

They wintered over in the summer house on Ray’s ranch. They worked in the fall, but by the winter, the ranch and the landscape around them were consumed by long stretches of quietness, still for as far as the eye could see. The sun shone clear and cold in the milky blue sky, and the air was so bitingly dry they rubbed beef tallow into their hands to keep them from cracking. From time to time, they woke up to snow that frosted the edges of the mission and the flat-roofed houses in Socorro, and stood in the shoulders of the pine trees. It dusted over the desert landscape, never deep enough to cover the rocks and scrub grass that still poked through. Lindsey looked for the White Lady often in those long nights and frigid, gray early mornings. She never saw her.

Time passed slowly that winter. Gerard got used to Bob’s cooking and warm food and sleeping under a roof again. He and Frank found moments to kiss behind the door of the summer house when no one else was around.

And yet.

Frank and Lindsey seemed to be spending more time together. It was natural that they had things to talk about, Gerard reasoned. Quietly, he felt a renewed bitterness toward the preacher man for giving them things in common that somehow still, even after it was over, seemed to bind them closer and shut him out. He felt sullenly jealous despite his best efforts.

In those times, he turned to Bob or Mariah. He fled to Bob’s blacksmith shop and let himself while away the time talking about tack and nails and horses’ shoes, about which hammers were least likely to leave your wrists sore after hours at the forge. He watched as Bob fixed tools and kitchen implements or cast bullets. They put new shoes on the mule. They put new shoes on Mariah. Gerard liked Bob, and he liked the blacksmith shop and the warmth from the forge fire. He liked riding in the desert and watching Mariah run in the large pasture she shared with the mule and the bay filly and several other horses. He was even beginning to like the mule. Mariah’s winter coat came in thick and woolly, and more touched with white around her eyes. She seemed older and more dignified, and Gerard was irritated that everyone around him seemed wiser than he was, that even his horse had somehow achieved this status of venerable wisdom ahead of him.

When he was by himself, so many things came charging back at him. How he had been such a useless coward at the beginning, before Lindsey had rallied him and pulled him off on a journey he should have been strong enough to make himself—but wasn’t. How now he had killed people, which was coldly horrifying to him and sometimes gave him bad dreams. How despite of all of his suffering over these things, none of it was enough to make him seem grown up to them, none of it made him the one they choose to share things with.

Lindsey continued to confound him. She had moody times when she was angry and lonesome and heartbroken, and nothing he or Frank could do seemed to help her settle. But more and more now, she seemed to have eyes for the people around her. She asked Ray about people in Socorro and what he thought the town needed most. She asked Bob about what he had done before he had settled here. She asked Frank about his time cowboying and how he learned to shoot. When Gerard looked at her, her eyes were clearer, and he felt that she saw him. It was nothing like the single-minded focus she had had when they were on the trail together, her always with one eye ahead on the preacher man. Gerard wondered if she was finding ways to let the anger run out of her. Then he chastised himself for thinking of her so familiarly, his curiosity over what went on inside her heart.

The more worry and frustration he felt over Frank and Lindsey, the more he realized how tender and complicated his feelings were becoming toward them both. Together.

 

One day, Gerard and Lindsey stood out by the fence. Frank had been with them and just gone to help Ray and Bob reload old casings with Bob’s new bullets and gunpowder Ray had just brought back from Albuquerque. Lindsey and Gerard had joked and teased and made Frank laugh til he choked on his words before he left them and went inside. Now that Frank was gone, their mood together soured, smarting from his absence. 

Gerard turned away from Lindsey and the houses and toward the river. He felt he should still behave as though the mood between them was light, and it irritated him. Everything between the three of them made him cranky and jealous. He wanted her to leave so he could be alone with his frustration, and at the same time, he didn’t want her to go anywhere.

“You’re moody lately,” she said behind him. “Something bothering you?”

He tapped his hands on the fence. He felt the rail move heavily as she leaned against it.

“You know what I am, Lindsey?” he said, his tone a little sharper than he intended. “I’m feeling … confused. I feel like we three just got ourselves out of one mess not too long ago, and we’re about to get ourselves into another.” He scrubbed hands hard over his face and pushed his hat back.

He glanced at her, and in her face, he could see her as she acknowledged what he meant by their mess. He had been afraid she would make him explain it, say more of it out loud, but, as usual, she was too canny for that.

“You been like this for a while now, Gerard—all friendly and come hither, and then stay away. This is what you been worrying about, isn’t it? Our mess?” She smiled. “You're a strange one, Gerard, the things you choose to worry over.”

“But—” Gerard said, frustrated. “How can you just stand by while we three … do this? Don’t it seem just a little strange to you?”

Lindsey smiled, looking far away on the horizon, and then back at him, and then to the house where Frank had gone. Her face was part amused and part sad. Finally, she answered him.

“Gerard, you already know,” she said. “I think it's less lonely with three. I told you that, with the holly trees. So, no, it don’t seem as strange to me as all that, and I don’t think it’s no mess. That’s not what I’d call it.”

Gerard shook his head, continuing to be amazed by her ability to take things in without fighting them—good things, bad things, all of it the same. Whatever ways she was settling and relaxing after the long journey, that part of her hadn’t changed. 

“It just … ain’t that easy,” he said, frustration in his voice.

Lindsey let his words rest a while before she answered him. “Not much is, so far as I can tell,” she said.

 

After that, late one night, Gerard watched from the summer house window and saw Frank and Lindsey come walking down, boots crunching over the frosty ground. He saw how they leaned close together in the cold and then stopped, turning toward each other in the silver moonlight.  He saw how their shadows merged in the dim light, and seeing it made his belly tight and restless.

He lay in the bed, the big bed by the door, and waited for them to come inside. Then the three of them lay down in the big bed together.

 

#### Chasing the Frontier

When spring came, they rode on, even though Ray had offered for them to stay, and Bob had teased and wheedled and finally straight out asked them if they would.

They morning they left, the sun came up pale and golden in the big sky. The river was full and fast after the winter, and the desert was peppered with wildflowers that peeped out among the rocks. Ray and Bob walked with them to the edge of town and the beginning of the western road.

Lindsey wore a dress, as she had more and more often that spring, although Ray hadn’t yet gotten used to seeing her that way. She was wider in the hips and softer in the face, looking more pregnant every day. The dress mostly hid her rounding, softening belly, but Ray could see it in her face too—that she was happier. That she was starting to make some measure of peace out of this.

Frank was calm and ready, squeezing Ray’s shoulder with sincerity, but with his eyes already ahead on the road. Late winter nights, in front of the fire when the others had gone to bed, Frank and Ray had talked about some of the happenings in his travels with the preacher man. Ray had waited, sure they’d see more of Frank’s anger in time, but they never did. Frank was a sheepdog, calmer and clearer sighted than the other animals around him, and Ray could see how he moved around both Gerard and Lindsey to gently point them in the right direction. For a while that winter, Ray had entertained the notion that he might convince Frank to stay in Socorro, hoping he could become another lawman in the town, a sharp shot who had a cool head and wasn’t overly eager to draw.  But soon enough, Ray could see that the appeal of an orderly town would be nothing compared to the draw of the other two, and Ray had quietly grieved and then accepted that. 

Gerard was thinner, his face less round and childish. He had become patient, willing to wait. Ray had seen how he had grown and stilled over the long winter, and he was more a man now than the boy that Bob had brought back that day from the desert. Ray also mourned the fact that Bob was losing such a companion. He had seen how they followed each other around all winter. That morning on the road, Mariah waited respectfully, but was obviously eager to move on and stretch her legs. Bob embraced Gerard and patted Mariah’s long nose, then stood away from them both.

That morning, Ray knew they were chasing what everyone riding after the frontier wanted, something he himself had once sought, holding it higher than any other goal—a place to be free.

He wondered, then and other times, what things they were taking from him as they left. He would feel it more and more in the months and years that followed, a growing restlessness and a feeling of being shut in, as the sheep herders built fences and the open range disappeared, as the roads unfurled bearing automobiles, as the oil derricks kept nodding. The roads stretched further and further out across the land, gathering up the open range and pulling it shut, like a drawstring of a sack. The wide open causeway of the prairie, the path that had brought Lindsey and Gerard and Frank to them, was closing. The world was changing from what it had been into something different. Sometimes, even the sky looked smaller.

But also on that morning, and on other days when his mind went back to that moment, Ray would marvel at how the three of them had picked just the right time to ride west, chasing the frontier toward the horizon like sunlight at the end of day. They caught it at its highest crest, when it was still just visible at the peak, like a wave in the Gulf of California in the setting sun, or the ripples of grama grass under a prairie storm.

He had the feeling they would keep that moment in their sights as they rode. For himself, he knew he had lost it the day he chose to settle in Socorro. But for them, he trusted that they would follow it to the edge of the world if they needed to, no matter where they ended up, whether in the mining towns and towering forests of California, or on the white sandy coasts of Mexico, that place which had itself been traced and divided away by lines not so long ago. As they continued on, Ray was certain they would find the place they were looking for.

Wherever they were riding to, it would be wild and empty enough for Lindsey to find the peace she needed, far from people and their foolish ways, out where a thing could just be what it was, without townfolk poking and gossiping or lawmen threatening. It would be free and lonesome enough that no one would question why the girl had two fathers, and all four of them could let life move on like the changing seasons—letting the past fall away and making space where eventually, a new time would come, like spring wildflowers.

Just as the baby girl would come in her time. Ray recognized the child that Lindsey carried as the little girl he saw sometimes in his dreams. When he saw Lindsey still walking with Santa Muerte, the girl, a beautiful, perfect little child with her mother’s black hair, was always with her.

On that morning in the cool spring, Ray was certain they would chase it and catch it, that frontier they were seeking.

He and Bob watched them ride away, painted black against the horizon. Ahead of them stood the frontier, full of wind, grass, and sky. At their backs was Socorro, with its mud brick houses and townspeople, the mission and its cross. Bob and Ray watched for a while, then they turned and walked back to town.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to starryfrights for the lovely complement work. I'm so thrilled you made pictures from my words! 
> 
> Thank you to Akamine_chan, Trojie, Jiksa, and Immoral Crow for beta reading, first takes, and encouragement of all sorts. None of this would have been possible without you all. <3


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